Word: pilgrim
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...last two weeks the way that Harvard students have been taught to interpret everything--by holding it still (and it won't hold still) and examining it. Mainly, we are intimately concerned with why this is going on. It is a silly thing to be concerned with. Billy Pilgrim (in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five) was concerned with it after some people from another planet carried him away in their space ship, but they set him straight...
...Welcome aboard Mr. Pilgrim," said the loudspeaker. "Any questions...
...That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter. Why anything? Because this moment simply is. have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber...
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...
Vonnegut passes on the information that pieces together Billy Pilgrim's life in a Tralfamadorian sense of order, not a chronological one. Instead of telling Billy's life "as it happened," he describes events that might be most enlightening when compared. The actual story of the book depends on the chronology of capture and eventual freedom during World War II. But Vonnegut's ideas don't depend on it--he tells us what the end of the book will be in the first chapter...