Slaughterhouse - Five Reading Entry Pages 119-136

Billy finds himself in bed with his wife on the night of their honeymoon. He is practically ignoring, barely answering her question and from the way it's written you can feel that he's thinking about something else, maybe even wnadering off in time. "You must have secrets about the war..."
"No."
"I'm proud you were a soldier. Do you know that?"
"Good."
"Was it awful?"
"Sometimes." (Vonnegut 121). Billy is barely paying attention to his wife, wandering off into space, or in his case, time. After this conversation he gets up to go to the bathroom, and arrives to the war, where funnily enough he still has to go to the bathroom. It seems as though he is living the same feelings even though he is in two completely different moments. Another example of this would be when he is in the Tralfamadorian zoo sleeping with Montana Wildhack, and suddenly he awakens in his own bed realizing that it was just a wet dream (Vonnegut 135). This brings us to the question of is Billy really travelling through time? What if these trips are all dreams that happen when he is forced to rest, like his honeymoon bed or his daughter forcing him to sleep after a patient's mother freaked out and said Billy was crazy? It just makes me feel that it's just dreams representing something he wnats. maybe he wants to remember what the war was like while talking to his new wife. Maybe he wanted to feel he was with Montana Wildhack, the famous actress. The trips could be real or represent desires, either memories or hopes.

In this chapter, the author makes a reference to himself. When Billy travels back to the war after getting up to go to the bathroom, he encounters a Russian, ignores him, walks into a latrine filled with sick Americans. He steps over on who says he had "excreted everything but his brains" and who would later say "There they go." "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." (Vonnegut 125). Why would the author make a reference to himself, especially in the type of situation he is? Why would he want to show himself in that state? Probably to show the hardships that a soldier was forced to live in and that he was a part of that. This reminds me a bit of Don Quixote, in which the author, Miguel de Cervantes, makes constant references to himself having a part in the story by presenting the "original" author's (Cid Hamete Benengeli) story. It is the same as Vonnegut, except for the fact that Vonnegut seems proud of having a part in the story, whereas Cervantes is constantly avoiding the fact that he truly wrote the novel, he mentions he is merely passing it on.