End Or Beginning?

We have come to the end of the journey with Billy Pilgrim. At the end we recall everything that happened over time. As I mention time, I remember the way Vonnegut plays with time travel and the Tralfamadorians. These alien beings hold great importance to what the reader understands. They are looking at the world from a separate perspective and Vonnegut’s way of transmitting the message. The author had told the reader how the book ended, but I didn’t expect it to end so abruptly. There was no summing of the main ideas, or explaining of the rest of Billy’s life. All of this was already done throughout the book. We knew since far back who he was going to marry, when and how he was going to die and basically everything about his life. You suddenly read “Word War Two in Europe was over” (Vonnegut, Chapter 10) and as that happens the book is over. This final chapter has made me realize that Vonnegut not only plays with time travel in the book but also in the way you read the book. You are told events in a total random order, or what I believe is random. The end of the book is the middle of the story, and this realization has changed the way I will look back at it.

Vonnegut does not completely ignore the past (beginning of the book). He makes the reader remember some things, like the first chapter. He talks about his trip to Dresden with Ohare. It is as if the book had just started and we are in chapter two. Smells in the book have played a big role especially to inform the reader of who is talking. It is interesting how you can discover where something came from in the last chapter: “But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas.” (Vonnegut, Chapter 10) I believe that this is the first time that this distinctive smell appears. This technique makes the reader draw his or her own conclusions. They are not told the origin or the answer to things like “mustard gas”(Vonnegut) until the end. The journey with Billy Pilgrim has taught me a lot of things and I hope that I will be able to apply them into my life.