Tralfamadorian Storytelling

The Tralfamadorians and their different philosophical views on time and death are one of the most interesting components of Slaughterhouse Five. Their belief that all moments can be viewed at the same time but cannot be changed is a huge influence on how the main character and protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, thinks and acts. Beyond Pilgrim, though, this Tralfamadorian mindset also shapes the structure of the novel and the way that it’s written as a whole.

In one of the scenes during the time that Billy is being held by the Tralfamadorians, Vonnegut gives the reader a description of a Tralfamadorian novel. It is said to be a collection of “brief clumps of symbols,” which are not read in any particular order, but are meant to be experienced all at once, with no beginning, middle, or end. While it is of course impossible for a book like this to be written for and understood by humans, as we aren’t capable of reading multiple “telegrams” at once, I would argue that Slaughterhouse Five is about as close as possible a comprehensible novel can get to the Tralfamadorian style.

The book is structered in an extremely unorthodox form, as the novel jumps back and forth between locations and time periods in tandem with Billy Pilgrim’s consciousness. This mode of storytelling seems deliberately disorienting, as it’s sometimes hard to “get settled” in a scene before Vonnegut whips you away to a completely different place. When this effect is experienced over the entire book, it makes the novel as a whole feel like something that, as a whole, produces “an image of life,” like a Tralfamadorian book does, as opposed to a traditional novel that’s a sequence of events.

Slaughterhouse Five switches between different scenes so quickly and often, in a seemingly random order, that, looking back on it, the lack of chronology makes it nearly impossible to recreate an idea of in what order the events of the story took place beyond a very basic level, either across the course of Billy Pilgrim’s life or in what order the scenes appear as written in the novel. As a result, after reading it, I’m left far more with a sense of the anti-war “point” of the story than with much memory of the plot, which seems to be Vonnegut’s intention, as he doesn’t focus on the actual “important” detais of events that much.

Beyond this, many of the elements of Vonnegut’s writing fit with the Tralfamadorian style. It is stated that these books have “no suspense,” and that fits perfectly with Slaughterhouse Five,” as Vonnegut tells the reader from the beginning exactly what happens in the book, what the “climax” is, and which characters will live and die. Vonnegut’s extremely short sentences in places also fit with the Tralfamadorian “telegram” sentences. And finally, the expression “so it goes,” seemingly dismissing death in some way, reflects the Tralfamadorian’s view that death doesn’t really matter, as it’s inevitable and that person is alive in other moments.

Mumbo Jumbo?

I started reading Mumbo Jumbo with far too little focus. After it had been somewhat built up in class to be this ridiculous, extremely hard-to-read, at points incomprehensible book, I was expecting the worst. When in the second sentence Zuzu is called a "doo-wack-a-doo and voo-do-dee-odo fizgig" (which I, for some reason, interpreted as words that were describing a dog), I was resigned to not being unable to understand this first part and skipped a little bit ahead without reading the end of the paragraph. As I read the next several sentences, I had a completely inaccurate picture of Zuzu in my mind as a small dog, only strengthening my view on how strange this book was going to be as she began to drink and smoke cigarettes, before finally realizing my mistake and going back to see that Zuzu was described as a woman immediately after the string of nonsense words that had deterred me, and I would have been fine continuing forwards if I had read that. 

While Mumbo Jumbo is a very difficult book to read, especially at the start, it is far from impossible. Though on the surface it appears to be in some points a mix of gibberish, typos, and random things, such as pictures and quotations, thrown in without much explanation, once you look a bit deeper, it's possible to somewhat ignore or gloss over some of the extra, strange, information to get to the core story. In general, it's not nearly as different from normal novels as Reed would seem to want you to believe, as it uses many of the same conventions as most novels do, albeit in slightly different forms. 

The start of the book has by far the most prominent examples of this unusual style of writing, from the oddly-placed first section to the short chapters that jump around to the huge amount of new, unfamiliar terms. It almost seems as if Reed is attempting to provide some sort of shock value in the beginning, to show just how strange this book is going to be by going all-out with the first few chapters. This section was the hardest for me to understand by a very long way, but, as the book goes on, it becomes much easier. Though the reader's progression and ability to pick up the meaning of some of the terms through context are part of what makes the book easier to read later, it's also in large part because Reed writes the rest of the book in a much more normal way. There is a decrease in the number of sudden images, strange phrasings, and the like, and it begins to read more normally. While the actual ideas of the book continue to be extremely out-there and strange, such as the search for the Talking Android using skin-altering cream, the claim that Warren G. Harding is actually black, and countless others, the language used to convey them is actually not all that unusual by the end. In the section discussing the history of Osiris and Set especially, perhaps in part due to the change in narrator from Reed to LaBas, it was easy to "forget" that I was reading this supposedly strange Mumbo Jumbo, as it seemed pretty much like any normal book in places. 

In addition to the writing style becoming less unusual as the novel goes along, it also becomes more clear that the structure of Mumbo Jumbo as a whole is fairly conventional. The extremely disjointed, short opening chapters with limited connections between them in terms of characters give way to those that are generally longer, and sketch out a continuous, central plot with recurring characters that serves as the backbone of the novel and has a somewhat "normal" arc up until its resolution at the end, using some quite popular storytelling conventions. In addition, though the book in points has places where it seems to want to appear free from structure, such as Chapter 1 being located outside the usual boundaries of the story and there being two separate Chapter 52's without explanation, these are more an exception than a rule, and the novel as a whole is fairly bound by traditional chapter structure.

History of the Future

In class discussions recently, we've been talking a lot about the fact that it's more or less impossible to have a completely factual view of history, as some personal bias will invariably seep in to any historical book or record and give it some sort of narrative it's trying to tell. Even primary sources that provide information about the ancient world are for large part not physical evidence, but written accounts by people who witnessed the events. Potential inaccuracies in these sources, as well as some ulterior motive or prejudice that the writer holds ("history is written by the victors") means that many of them can't be trusted to give a complete story, leading to the idea of a "postmodernist history" that we discussed, where it's accepted that not everything can be known and that history contains some lies.

However, it's not certain that this distrust of even primary sources will always be necessary. I was thinking about how the types of evidence that we have for older times compare to more recent sources, and how the methods of recording events that we currently have will eventually be used to look back on our society. To start, the sheer amount of information that is contained on the internet will mean that there will be a much higher volume of written sources to draw from. This still brings up the same concerns about biased or flawed writing, though, and many of these things still can't be entirely trusted, as they are a human attempt to create a narrative.

Modern technology may actually make it possible to provide an entirely unbiased account of history. Things like pictures and video recording are about as close as it's possible to get to an exact reflection of reality, as they just show the images and/or sounds that were present at the time, and nothing more. Unlike things such as paintings from the past, they contain virtually no input besides setting a camera up, giving them much less human influence. A future historian who watches a video of an event will get a nearly identical experience to someone who was actually there at the time, and as recording technology improves this will become even more true. While this won't affect much about the history of things long before the present day, it means that this, modern, time period will be far more well-documented than any previous. This may even make the entire idea of a postmodern history unnecessary at some point, as all events would be preserved in such a way that they can be accessed and experienced again as they were, eliminating mistakes that humans may make when recounting something that happened to them or bias that affects the way they record it, as it will be virtually impossible to misrepresent history with this type of recording, unless it was done intentionally.

What's in a Name?

When reading Ragtime, one of the first things that struck me as unique was Doctorow's use of capitalized pronouns (Mother, Father, etc...) to refer to people in the story. At first I thought when he was describing the family in this way, it was because they weren't going to be recurring characters in the novel, that it was just an example he was using to illustrate life in the time period, but the nameless family turned out to be some of the central figures in the book. 

The people discussed in Ragtime are a mixture of fictional characters created by Doctorow, such as the family and Coalhouse, and the author's representations of real historical figures like Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit. People from both of these groups regularly interact with members of the opposite group, though not in extremely significant ways, such that the conversations that Doctorow claims they had aren't truly disprovable historically, that they could have plausibly happened.

The first significant example we see of this type of intersection of real and fictional characters is when Houdini literally crashes into the family's life. In most other books, this would seem ridiculous, as the protagonists just meeting Houdini out of nowhere is really unrealistic. However, I didn't view it as Houdini crashing into the house of the protagonists, whose story we are hearing, rather the story is being told about the family because they are the family whose house Houdini crashed into. This kind of thing occurs throughout Ragtime, as some people in the family have close connections with Coalhouse, Evelyn Nesbit, and Robert Peary, but I still wouldn't say that this makes the family special. They're just a normal, generally remarkable family, who happen to have interactions with some more influential and famous people.

I believe that this theme is what Doctorow is getting at with his choice not to name the members of the family. While the historical figures in the story obviously need to have their names, Doctorow is clearly trying to say something by naming some of his created characters, such as Coalhouse, while leaving others with simply titles. This shows that Mother, Father, and the boy aren't significant to the story on their own; they could be replaced with any other family including a mother, a father, and a child. It's said at one point that Father feels like he is spectating the relationship between Coalhouse and Sarah develop, that he's somewhat distant from it and is just watching it take place. It's the named characters in the novel; the Coalhouses, the Evelyns, the Emmas, who truly move the plot along and shape it. The unnamed family, on the other hand (besides Younger Brother, to an extent) don't truly have a huge effect on the plot themselves; they are just involved with the people that do and for that reason are able to witness it.