Michael's Blog

I think that us as readers will believe anything that is written in a book to an extent. We are taught at a young age that if you read books you’ll expand your mind and become more intelligent on subjects you read about. When Trout and Maggie have this conversation about “if the stuff he writes about is really true”, Trout makes up a story and Maggie believed every word that came out of his mouth. When Then trout backed it up by saying “It’s like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or you get in trouble” (pg.218). We all know that sometimes even advertising isn’t always truthful they want you to buy their product. Same thing for authors they want to write something that will sell and make them money. In slaughterhouse five Vonnegut uses many surreal scenes throughout this book but at the same time he uses pretty extreme ones as well. He wants to make this book realistic but at the same time he feels that if he does then it’ll be boring so he throws in some ridiculous scenarios like Billy getting in a plane crash and him being the only one that survives the plane crash, after the plane crash he starts telling people that he got kidnapped by the Tralfamadorian’s and was held prisoner for many years but seemed like seconds on Earth. This is when us as readers take a second and say “Wait a minute. Did this really happen? There is no way.” Us as readers have to understand what Vonnegut is trying to write about in this book. My understanding of the book is that he didn’t want to make this book so real that the audience gets bored with it after a couple of chapters and puts it down. He wanted to make it into an interesting story about a kid who entered the war and ever since he has never been the same mentally and physically.