Jose Maria was gambling through the letters and sentences while Billy Pilgrim traveled in time constantly. Pages grew eternal as time’s cycle started and ended, and I was beginning to feel the perplexity of who was talking to me. I thought of Billy as a prisoner of war, who saw Dresden fall in the hands of massacre, while Jose Maria shrugged the deaths and followed the chapter, dying. “So it goes” (Vonnegut 91). The narrator constantly interfered in Billy Pilgrim’s life stream as a dead person appeared. It happened, it couldn’t be prevented. It just happened. And as he read the book, it also just happened. Confused about who was talking to him, Jose Maria kept reading while the same question meddled in his mind: who is the narrator of this story? It could be Billy Pilgrim, or it could be the man himself, he who wrote the book, Kurt Vonnegut. Billy Pilgrim lived the amber of the moment, but Vonnegut also lived during World War II. He was also trapped in that cage of war.
I felt pity about his confusion. He kept underlining important parts of the text, hoping to answer that question I’d asked myself. Maybe the answer was in that “Fourth Dimension”, invisible to my eyes and to his too. I kept thinking if the story was true or only “the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor” (Vonnegut 115). He asked himself, ‘a metaphor of what?’, but was only caught into ore confusion, more questions, and the answers remained unknown for all of them. Maybe that’s our fate, to live a list of moments without meaning, without answers and just say to ourselves “That’s life” (Vonnegut 115), trying to be indifferent towards that why of the existence of the moment. We cannot do anything about it, we just live it, are part of it, and don’t have the authority to question our free will in it. I felt like when I watch a movie for the second time. Alredy knowing what’s going to happen, we hope that it happens differently so the main character’s fate goes the way we want it to go. But this doesn’t happen: it’s already predestined to be. That’s life.
But still the question came through his mind, and I felt sorry for his confusion. The differences and similarities between Billy Pilgrim and the supposed narrator were each time more ambiguous to me. Who was who? Billy Pilgrim couldn’t be the narrator because the story wasn’t simply narrated in the first person purely. There was another guy present in this amber of the moment: “The truth of it startled him. It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim-and for me too” (Vonnegut 121). That was clear. There was more than one person within the amber of the moment we were all living. Not only Billy Pilgrim, but an unknown narrator who referred to himself as “me”, but in the amber I’m also present, and Jose Maria too. The writer’s unknown, his time, and his position in this story. There’s a third person omnipresent who knows everything that’s happening from the massacre at Dresden to the aspect of Billy being “unstuck in time”. He is all knowing. He knows the beginning, middle, and end for the story which leads to Billy’s impossibility to change any aspect of his life, and therefore mine. This person is still present within the text, “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (Vonnegut 125). Indeed, there’s the author, the narrator, the creator of Billy’s universe. I felt he was relieved about the fact he had answered one of his questions, but still more popped into my mind. Felt apologetic about reading this chapter. That was me, the author of this blog.
I felt pity about his confusion. He kept underlining important parts of the text, hoping to answer that question I’d asked myself. Maybe the answer was in that “Fourth Dimension”, invisible to my eyes and to his too. I kept thinking if the story was true or only “the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor” (Vonnegut 115). He asked himself, ‘a metaphor of what?’, but was only caught into ore confusion, more questions, and the answers remained unknown for all of them. Maybe that’s our fate, to live a list of moments without meaning, without answers and just say to ourselves “That’s life” (Vonnegut 115), trying to be indifferent towards that why of the existence of the moment. We cannot do anything about it, we just live it, are part of it, and don’t have the authority to question our free will in it. I felt like when I watch a movie for the second time. Alredy knowing what’s going to happen, we hope that it happens differently so the main character’s fate goes the way we want it to go. But this doesn’t happen: it’s already predestined to be. That’s life.
But still the question came through his mind, and I felt sorry for his confusion. The differences and similarities between Billy Pilgrim and the supposed narrator were each time more ambiguous to me. Who was who? Billy Pilgrim couldn’t be the narrator because the story wasn’t simply narrated in the first person purely. There was another guy present in this amber of the moment: “The truth of it startled him. It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim-and for me too” (Vonnegut 121). That was clear. There was more than one person within the amber of the moment we were all living. Not only Billy Pilgrim, but an unknown narrator who referred to himself as “me”, but in the amber I’m also present, and Jose Maria too. The writer’s unknown, his time, and his position in this story. There’s a third person omnipresent who knows everything that’s happening from the massacre at Dresden to the aspect of Billy being “unstuck in time”. He is all knowing. He knows the beginning, middle, and end for the story which leads to Billy’s impossibility to change any aspect of his life, and therefore mine. This person is still present within the text, “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (Vonnegut 125). Indeed, there’s the author, the narrator, the creator of Billy’s universe. I felt he was relieved about the fact he had answered one of his questions, but still more popped into my mind. Felt apologetic about reading this chapter. That was me, the author of this blog.
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