Slaughterhouse-five Ch.1: Is This The Start Or The End Of The Infinity

What most got into my mind after reading the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-five is that Kurt Vonnegut will play a lot with time. He constantly goes back to the memories of the war and tells the story as if there was no beginning and no end. “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.”(Slaughterhouse-five pg.1) Even from the beginning of the novel he already plays with the certainty of time and events in the main character’s memory. He also incorporates one song on this chapter that is a song that keeps on going infinitely. Kurt Vonnegut might have put this song in his chapter to foreshadow to us that his novel will be like an infinity loop going from past to present to future. When I think of something infinite it is mostly not material because material objects will eventually be damaged or lost. I think instead of some teaching or lesson that stays with humankind for eternity. Any teaching that has been passed from generation to generation over a period of time will always be kept. It is like the talking they did to the kids while they slept in the book A Brave New World. They grew to be old and eventually never forgot the lessons they were taught while asleep.

While reading this chapter I realized that the main character said several times that he was old and couldn’t remember all his memories anymore. “I’m an old fart with his memories.”(Slaughterhouse-five pg. 7) When he said this it made think of Ishmael. Ishmael said that human kind thinks that there are eternally flawed. Since the main character repeated that phrase several times it made me think that he is saying that he is flawed and will have a hard time remembering the things that happened during the war. “People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”(Slaughterhouse-five pg.22) This also expresses a flaw that human kind can have that is to forget easily the things we are not supposed to forget and to forget easily the ones we have to be able to forget. Humankind has to be able to remember the past to be able to avoid doing the mistakes that were done in the past. When one has to forget easily is harder to forget and it is partly because you have feelings involved. For example if you want to have revenge on one person because he did something you did not like you will tend to not forget this until you fulfill your goal that is to take revenge. Another example is when one has had a relationship with someone and you will never forget that relation even if you have millions after that one. Kurt Vonnegut might have included these flaws when introducing and describing the actions of the main character to show the reader that he is also human and has flaws like everyone else.

Dante Each Time Less Human

The Inferno as described by Dante is a place where everything is done with divine and perfect justice. The term of poetic justice can be used all throughout Dante’s trip through the Inferno. There are many kinds of sinners and many kinds of punishments. The sinners are people that have acted wrong against God and Dante has levels of punishments done to each sin. As we can see as he goes from the top of the Inferno to the bottom there are levels of punishments according to the sin. The first level of the Inferno is the limbo. In the limbo there were the people that did not act wrongly against God but where not baptized because they were born before Christianity appeared. “For these defects, and for no other evil, we now are lost and punished just with this: we have no hope and yet we live in longing.”(Inferno Canto IV, 40-42) The defects that Virgil is referring to are not defects that were determined by them they are not sins. A defect and a sin are things that are total opposites. A sin is something that you are told not to do and you do it by your own. In the other hand a defect is something that you are born with and you don’t determine or choose to do it. I think what Dante is trying to stress here with this part of the Inferno is that baptism and doing the rituals God tells us to do is as important as the difference between going to the Inferno or Heaven.

The last place in the Inferno is reserved for the traitors to benefactors. My conclusion from this level of the Inferno is that Dante could not simply tolerate people that were traitors. If I were to do a scale on which attributes of a person I disliked the most certainly traitors would be on the top of my list. A traitor is a person that you choose to confine your secrets with or be your friend, and all of a sudden he is on your enemy’s team and has given all the information and your secrets to them. A traitor is kind of a spy but much worse because he appears to be your friend and you trust him believing he is your friend and then he betrays you. This same thing happened to Jesus when Judas Iscariot betrayed him and that is why Judas is on the deepest level of the Inferno. “That soul up there who has to suffer the most, my master said: Judas Iscariot- his head inside, he jerks his legs without.”(Inferno Canto XXXIV, 61-63) Jesus was a benefactor so when Judas betrayed him he entered the last and deepest place in the Inferno. Dante’s trip ends after that when they reach again the path that leads to world but if Dante’s inferno were to continue much more things would happen. After that I would say that there would be much more suffering by the hands of Lucifer and his demons that are the ones in charge to torture sinners. Dante changed a lot during his trip to the Inferno so he would each time have to bear more sufferings of sinners. At the start of the Inferno Dante felt pity towards the sinners being tortured but as he traveled deeper he started to feel less pity towards them. Since each time he would go down a level the punishments grew worse each time he would grow more pitiless towards the dead. Dante would still change if the Inferno were going to continue and I think each time he would grow less aware that those souls that are there were once like him but committed terrible sins.

Utopian Terza Rima

In the perfect world respect will be key, A
While differences will be the fun of life, B
No one can be sad, not even a flea. A

No one will be made by the blade of a knife, B
And there has to be freedom for all. C
Men will sustain their kids and their wife. B

Money will be based on the effort in the work hall, C
Even though there will be honesty, respect, and rights, D
Life wouldn’t be as dull as a wall. C

All people’s health will be checked in the nights. D
People will be respected by what they are, E
And all will fly happiness kites. D

The Poetic Justice Zone

In the episode of The Twilight Zone that we saw I found poetic justice to be greatly reflected. First, the two characters were soldiers from different sides of the war. When I realized that they had been in the war that meant that they had gone through many tough things in the war. Since I was searching for poetic justice I thought that when they were going to meet it would be a happy and good moment because the war had already ended. What happened was the complete opposite they had a fight over the little food they found. When I saw them fight I had to stop and think for a moment what was happening. As I did this I started to imagine that I had been in a war and after seeing many of my friends and fellow countrymen die under the hands of a person that I had in front I would have probably reacted the same way as the women did. Gradually they start understanding each other more and cooperating with each other. Finally when it seems that finally after all that suffering there would be poetic justice another event that disturbs the peace happens. As the woman enters to change in the recruiting office she sees all the propaganda the enemy has used to get people to fight. This gets her angry and she shoots the man that was waiting for her outside. The man barely misses the shot and goes away. After this it seemed as if the poetic justice they were long waiting for had suddenly been destroyed but the women being sorry goes to the place where the man is dressed in the dress he told her to put on. After this the poetic justice they deserved happened. They fell in love with each other that is the poetic justice of war since war is all generated and operated by hate.

Messenger Exchange

Sam entered the conversation.

Felipe says: Hey Sam, how are you?

Sam says: Fine thank you. I am kind of mad because I just moved to South Carolina and I had all my friends in California. :-(

Felipe says: What was wrong with California, I mean didn’t you like it?

Sam says: It’s not that we didn’t like it there. My father got a promotion and we had to leave and also the school year was over so I didn’t leave anything started.

Felipe says: How bad we are all really going to miss you over here. How is your tennis doing? Have you gotten better lately?

Sam says: I am practicing a lot but still you can beat me. In a tournament last week I had to play against Nicholas.

Felipe says: What Nicholas are you talking about because I don’t remember any one named Nicholas?

Sam says: Don’t you remember that guy from camp last year that played really well.

Felipe says: Oh yeah I remember. How did it go? Did you win or lose?

Sam says: Well it was really a tight match he had 3 match points in the second set but I managed to save them. I went on to win the second set in tiebreaker. After that in the third set he got a three game lead. I started to focus again and play better but he had a very big lead and I couldn’t recover from it. He won the final set 6-2.

Felipe says: That seems like a tough match. Too bad you lost. (>-_-)>

Sam says: yeah but still I played very well so I am proud of me. And how is your school coming along?

Felipe says: It doesn’t seem as easy as I expected it to be but let’s say that I will survive. How about yours?

Sam says: I don’t start school until early September so I still have a few weeks left.

Felipe says: Lucky you. Sam I have to go now because I have to go to my grandma’s house so we’ll keep in touch. Hope you have a good time in South Carolina.

Felipe left the conversation.

Freedom In Blogs Is It Useful Or Useless?

The blog writing and reading is a thing that is very new to me. The first time I ever read or wrote a blog was in 9th grade when Mr. Tangen assigned us to do one for our readings. After that I started to gain some experience with the blogs and started to explore this new way of expressing ideas. Apart from knowing how to post in my blog and read the homework for the next day I didn’t know anything about blogs. Many things changed when I read this article about blogs. I learned new things that I did not know previously about them and started to see that it is a really innovative way of expression. Blogs don’t have to be structured like a book. A blog can express and say whatever the author wants to say and how he wants to say it. This is good to have certain degree of freedom to express ourselves but there might be some problems. If they don’t follow any rules they can write whatever they want even if it is misspelled or false information. “They don't even stop to punctuate. And if they can't put quite the right inflection on a sentence, they'll often use an OMG (Oh my god!) or an emoticon, e.g., a smiley face :-) or a wink ;-) or a frown :-( instead of words.” I know that blogs are a fast way of obtaining the information you want and you may think it might be right to abbreviate phrases and feelings, or do run on sentences to make it go faster. But really if a blog ends up having so many abbreviations, run on sentences and spelling mistakes it may misleading for the person who is reading. Another big problem that I noticed from reading this article was that there is so much freedom that you can write things that aren’t true about history or spelling or even news. “They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education.” What is being said is that blogs can also be used to tell lies. Imagine that one day you get home really late and need to do homework about how the French people’s lifestyle was in the 1800s. You go into your computer and find this really good blog that says all you need to know. You are not completely sure if it is credible so you look up the name of the author in Google and find out that he is a historian of some university and it is a credible source. You decide to use this webpage and when you hand it in and the paper gets returned to you, you find out that all that was in there were lies. I also learned many positive aspects from learning more about blogs. I learned that you can get events narrated by different persons. “Every sport, every war, every hurricane brings out a crop of bloggers, who often outdo the mainstream media in timeliness, geographic reach, insider information, and obsessive detail.” This is the positive side of that freedom that you can get information really quick and have a diversity of point of views. Also sometimes the news can be biased so this is a very useful tool because people who lived some events can posed a non biased version. The problem with this freedom is that anything can be written in a blog without control of any kind so it can be a very useful tool or a bad tool.