Word: deathly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Throughout Vonnegut's book there is a persistent and unavoidable sense of preoccupation similar to the feeling of obligation we now feel towards strike activities. What he is obligated to in Slaughterhouse-Five is death. This isn't a very easy thing for a fatalist to be obligated to Fatalism (that is, the belief that the "reasons" why things happen to us are a series of random events beyond our control) serves us particularly well as a transition--to, for example, move us philosophically from event to event in our existence. When someone's existence terminates in the book...
...Kurt Vonnegut doesn't really want to write a war book about death. That's why its presence hangs throughout this book as something he is unable to avoid. He takes off the first chapter to explain he doesn't want to write about war. He just has to. The book is more a thing of his environment than of himself? But we, for some reason, don't believe him when we read him saying that war is a topic he's been forced to deal with. I don't know Why we don't believe it. But, for some...
LISTEN: the most fascinating thing about this book is the way Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian understanding of time to deal with the importance of death. Tralfamadore is the planet 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away, to which Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped. Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments of time in the same way we can look at a whole range of the Rocky Mountains. For those who can travel in time (Billy Pilgrim can and does) any particular moment can be visited. Nothing is "future"; nothing is "past." All moments exist, always have, and always will...
This means that death isn't an "event" that "happens" to you. But you death is part of the way you're defined, part of the way you always exist. If you think of yourself as being "alive" at this particular moment, that's just because you are visiting this part...
...other thing is missing-an adequate tribute to the fact that Hemingway's obsession with death came paired with a ravenous appetite for living. He savored the odor, the flavor, the texture of life like a condemned man eating his last meal. None of his contemporaries described life's "moveable feast" so lovingly. He took an elemental, purring pleasure in food, drink, sun, physical grace, all animals. He condensed life to pure sensuousness, and before he savaged it-and before it savaged him-he celebrated it as it has rarely been celebrated...