Candide Ch 4 And 5: Candide A Very Different Book

I kept on noticing ironic parts in Candide so I went into Wikipedia to look at further information of Voltaire. What I could find is that Voltaire is a writer that through his books and works criticized the society and was in favor of a social reform. He also defended freedom of religion, liberties of civilians, and free trade. As I kept on reading I noticed that he used satirical writing to criticize Catholic Church and French institutions. When I read this a part of Candide came up to my mind. According to Candide: "And gave him the two florins he had received from James, the honest Anabaptist" (Candide pg 28). This was completely satirical because Candide had been hungry and without shelter and people from the Catholic community had denied him. The target of this satirical part is the Catholic Church. Then what was absurd is that the Catholics that are supposed to be the good people and the Anabaptist which is supposed to be less good was the one that helped him. Hyperbole is that he was thrown a bucket of something by a woman when he was asking the orator to help him. The irony in this part is that the Anabaptist who is the one that is not under Catholicism and is supposed to be worse than a Catholic is the one who ends up having compassion of Candide and helping him. After reading more about Voltaire I started to see the book in a different way and having in mind his targets in most of his works, I started to understand and get more of his satire.

In the past blog I made a prediction of what I thought was going to happen in the book next, but in chapter four part of my prediction was proved wrong, but the other part was in some way proven right in chapter five. In the past blog I predicted that he will get back to Cunègonde and he will have a very hard time getting through it. When I read in page 29: "Cunègonde is dead," I suddenly realized that there was no way in a real book that she could come back to life. When Candide heard this he fainted and almost did I too. He fainted because his love was dead and I almost fainted by a very different cause. When I made that prediction I had in mind that this book as many other stories would end up in the same happy ending where Candide will finally end up with Cunègonde and they will live happily ever after. I almost fainted of happiness when I saw she was dead. It is not that I like people to die, but I was very happy and anxious to see finally a book in some time where it wasn't a happy ending. Sometimes you get so used to seeing some events and things happen in books that you get tired but, this might be Voltaire's strategy critique of other writers or a way to catch the reader. The second part of my prediction was that he would have to do very hard things to be able to return to the paradise in which he was in before he made the mistake. When Pangloss said: "What can be the 'sufficient reason' for this phenomenon" (Candide pg 32). Candide and Pangloss had gone through very hard events like the shipwreck and the earthquake and until now that was part of my prediction. After seeing that they had passed through several harsh events I would imagine the rest of the book to continue having critique against society and difficult events for Candide to overcome.

Candide Ch 2 And 3: The Power Of Mistakes

You never know what you have until you lose it all. We will never value the things we have until some event will take all those things from us. One similar thing happened to Candide. According to Candide: "After being turned out of this earthly paradise, Candide wandered off without thinking which way he was going" (Candide pg 22). After you have everything you may want in life and all of a sudden you lose it you can start to question your purpose. In the case of Candide love proved to be more powerful that reason so he got carried with it and was kicked out. There are many other cases in real life where a sudden difficult situation is enough to make the person crumble and in the worst case scenarios they will commit suicide. The author mentions this in his book because he might be trying to get the reader to feel some sort of compassion towards Candide because he has lost everything in life. He will also be trying to show us how he is going to try to get all that he had beck and surviving the hard times. I predict that this story will be a story where Candide has to go through difficult situations to be able to get back to his love Cunègonde. There are many ways to lose things in life. There can be cases where you commit a terrible mistake that ends up leading to your loss or maybe another person doesn't want you to succeed and takes everything away from you.

Resentment is another theme that is present in Candide. Resentment is a word that means a feeling of indignant displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as wrong, insult, or injury and that is what a person will feel towards someone that has just made his life go from heaven to hell. War is a main exponent of resentment and in Candide we can find it when Candide tells us: "Finally, the bayonet provided 'sufficient reason' for the death of several thousand more" (Candide pg 25). War is a process where there is no final winner until one side is completely destroyed. In war the mechanism used is you attack me I attack you so this is going to have an end where one side is completely annihilated. I think at the beginning of chapter three there is an irony part because Candide thinks of war as an idea of "Beauty and brilliance of the display" (Candide pg 25). How can war be beautiful? Unless you are a person who doesn't care about anything that happens to other persons or the deaths and sufferings that war brings along you have to find everything but beauty in war. War is the slaying of thousands of people to please the likes of the people in power. The wars are never fought by the ones who want the war to happen they will always be fought by people who might not even agree with the idea. I tend to associate beauty with things that bring joy to human beings. Art is a perfect example of beauty and literature because both have the ability to bring joy to humans. I would say that war can bring joy only to a few people that are the president of the countries when they win. If I were a soldier in any war I wouldn't be happy we won, I would be happy that all the sufferings and the deaths of my friends would stop. If it is by mistakes that war starts or by proposed means war will bring with it effects were people will never be the same and whole nations might end with big resentments toward other nations.

Handbook Of Epictetus Sections 25-30: Why Can’t Humans Learn?

As I kept reading more and more sections of Epictetus I am starting to get the feeling that he is not as different as many of the rules of living I have learned before. For example if you can recall the teachings of Ishmael you can remember that he kept on saying that the human beings think they are eternally flawed. I found in this reading that Epictetus constantly mentions that what humans do is what is wrong. According to the Handbook Of Epictetus: "In the same way nothing bad by nature happens in the world" (Section 27). Epictetus completely agrees that human kind is eternally flawed because he is saying that all done by nature is correct, but what is done by humans represents all evil in the world. We are supposed to be the animals that have the biggest brains but certainly animals that are far way less developed than us happen to live with nature and not against it. I don't think that we are eternally flawed because we have big brains and have the ability to learn how to co-exist with the planet but apparently it is as if we didn't want to do this. Epictetus has really stressed the fact in many of his sections that everything but nature is what we can't determine and everything that means us having a choice to make is human. When he says that everything humans do is wrong then we can infer that he thinks that we can't make the correct decisions.

A lesson that really interested me was when Epictetus talked about hypocrites. In many teachings I have seen from many different teachers I have never seen a lesson target so directly the hypocrites. Epictetus says: "But we should have remembered how we feel when we hear the same thing about others" (Section 26). What Epictetus is trying to make us understand is that we should do our actions in accordance to what we say. If the dog of your friend dies and you say that it is okay and that he had to die, you must do the same when your dog dies. It is sometimes very easy to say things and never do them, but you are not being loyal to your word. I have seen this happen a lot in tournaments when a friend says that he will never again hit his racquet in the floor and in the next match he plays I see he bangs it. Talking of tennis there was another lesson that really can apply to any sport o thing you do. When you want to do something you have to very clearly understand what you have to do to get there and what will happen next. When the handbook said: "For each action, consider what leads up to it, and approach it in the light of that" (Section 29) I really felt connected with that lesson. I have always dreamed of becoming a very good tennis player. When I was little I expected to be the best one but I didn't train as much. I stopped for a while because I got bored and about two years ago I started to play again. I met this person who knew a lot about tennis and asked me what I wanted to be in tennis. When I answered him he asked me that if I wanted something I had to work enough to be able to get it. I suddenly realized I had to train a lot more and do everything with my goal in mind. This is a very valuable lesson because sometimes you expect things to be easy and let's face it, being the best at something is really hard. We sometimes forget that we have to do a lot of work in order to achieve our goals. This section really interested me because it reminded me of my goals and all the work I have to put into achieving them.

The Biggest Dilemma In My Life

Dear Mr. Frost,

I have never before been face with the dilemma of having two ways and having to choose to go by one. What I would say is that in that specific case I would have another dilemma apart from choosing which way should I go through. My principles clearly state that you shouldn't mind what is done by other people, but you should be bothered by the actions you take when they are up to you. In this case the dilemma would be if that special situation was placed for me by another person or if I did it myself. The fact that the two ways were laid for me was done definitely by another person, but the fact that I have to choose which way I will take is an action that is up to me. If you happen to have some spare time and read the handbook I wrote called Handbook Of Epictetus you will find that in section four I say that always before you do an action you must say to yourself that it must all be in accordance with nature. That piece of advice has always worked for me in every event in my life but when I was faced with your event I had no way of choosing my way according to nature. First I thought that maybe I would just wait for a sign of nature to guide me like a butterfly or a gust of wind but then I saw that that was a very simple solution that could lead me through the wrong way.

When I heard your descriptions and read verse twelve I started to have an idea of which road I would choose. When you said: "No step had trodden black" (The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost), I imagined that the road had never been set feet upon and started to wonder why. Suddenly I jumped to the conclusion that if already other people had passed through it then it must mean that they had found something about that road and not the other road affect their decision. Maybe they were thinking as me at the beginning that I thought I would choose the one that people had walked through because maybe I could find another person in the way or some sign that people that passed through this road survived. Or maybe they thought about the good of the whole group and choose to go through the side that most people had already been through. In the last part of the poem you make a lot of emphasis on the fact that you were the one that chose the other road. When you made that emphasis in I did you mean that for your traits and abilities only you could survive in that road or only you meant to exalt the fact that you were a pioneer and the first one to try this road. After imagining the probable outcomes of each road I would probably end up choosing the one that no one except you had chosen. In my handbook in section seven I make a big emphasis in the fact that you must look towards saving yourself and not the rest of the group so meaning that most people went by the way that had been taken and that I would prefer to save myself I would choose the road not taken. It wouldn't really matter which road I chose because I am an actor in a play and my destiny is already set so either one I chose will be my destiny.

    Your Friend,

     Epictetus

Sections 20-25 Handbook Of Epictetus: Epictetus A Very Good Teacher

Never give up is a very common piece of advice that a person will give to you. I think this advice has been used so many times that it has essentially lost its meaning. Not giving up is not as easy as it sounds. The thought of giving up will eternally be around everyone when they have moments in sports, school, or life where they simply do not want to do what they are doing anymore. According to Epictetus: "And remember that if you hold to these views, those who previously ridiculed you will later be impressed with you, but if you are defeated by them you will be doubly ridiculed" (Section 22). Every time in life there will be persons that will try to bring you down for a selfish reason. The important thing is to always jump back and like a spring try to jump higher than before. This has happened to me many times in tennis when people start telling me that I should lose hope and that I will never be able to play good tennis. The thing I try to do after this is always to ignore their nasty thoughts and train way harder to become even better. It is as if the negative thoughts and the hate of other persons will make you stronger rather than hurt you. Epictetus might have done this with a clear reason to show that the more you persist and try in life the better it will go. This has been the first time I have read that Epictetus says that there is some kind of free will. I got the idea that he shows to us the free will to choose between being affected by people who try to bring you down or just ignore them. In the handbook Epictetus is referring to the teachings he preached but it can really be assembled into anything you do in life.

I sometimes have thoughts that involve my status in the world. Sometimes I like to reflect and see where I would like to be in a couple of years. There are a wide variety of answers to this question but the thing in which all answers coincide is in having good friends and being concerned about my reputation. What Epictetus is trying to tell me is: "And how will you be a nobody everywhere, if you need to be a somebody only in things that are up to you" (Section 24). After having read this I started to think about the importance of being someone. What I understood from what Epictetus is trying to teach us is that it doesn't matter what other people think of you because they are things that do not depend on you, but it is rather important for me to be recognized in the things that are up to me. Sometimes I see people that are too preoccupied on being the most popular persons on school and that they do not care how much they destroy other people's feelings. I have met many people that would do anything for being popular even laugh about their closest friends to be funny. People that can change a friend just because he doesn't have good looks or because the popular group makes fun of him are not true friends. I really prefer to have one single friend in the world that I know that I can trust fully in him than rather a big group of people in which I do not know if I am friends with them for the looks and my ego.

The Handbook’s Teachings My Uses Of Them

The Handbook Of Epictetus is a book that tries to teach us how to live. As soon as I began to read the next ten sections I started to form an idea. My idea was that this handbook will just tell us how we are supposed to live but it wouldn't give us any examples that might prove useful to understanding. As soon as I started to read I saw the complete opposite. First as I was reading this quotation really got my mind: "Did your child die? It was given back" (Section 11). This has been a question that everyone has tried to answer. The question is the great question of death. Every book of teachings has tried to explain the reasoning and what happens after death. The answers for these two questions really depend on each individual and their beliefs. I would say that death happens because we have a destiny already determined by God and that we can't evade it. I have thought many times about knowing your destiny and trying to avoid it. The more I think about this the more I am sure of the answer that it will not matter how much you try to evade it, it will always get to you. The second question I would answer it by saying that people that have been bad during life will receive some kind of punishment in the afterlife and people that have been good will receive a reward. I think the author or authors of this handbook had a clear intention by mentioning death in this handbook. Every movement and religion basically starts by trying to answer this question because it is a question that has always been around since humankind existed.

The section that most interested me was section 17. In section 17 there was a teaching about destiny. Destiny is one of the things I like most to think about while I am in my bed before going to sleep. My conclusion is always that we already have our destiny set and that we just have to live our life and wait for it to happen. The part of section 17 that most got to me was: "Remember that you are an actor in a play, which is as the playwright wants it to be" (Section 17). This has been the best example of predetermined destiny I have seen so far. Once my sister asked me what I thought my destiny was and I told her that I didn't know and she asked me to explain my theory. Probably it was a homework she had to do because normally she wouldn't ask me that sort of questions. I explained her my reasoning and gave several examples but she still wouldn't understand. If I had read this handbook before it would have been very simple to make her understand because this example was as clear and simple as possible. As I have read this handbook I have found many part that have shown deep reasoning and understanding and another part I found was this part: "None of this signs is for me, but only for my petty body or my petty property" (Section 18). This shows one of the things I believe in that is the mind over body. The author of this handbook might be trying to say that the body is the weaker part of the person and that the mind is what matters. This is a thought that comes to my mind a lot when I'm training. The thought that the mind controls the body and that pain is only mental helps me a lot to concentrate on my objective. I also do this frequently when I am in a tennis match and I am exhausted but I always keep thinking positive and that the mind is stronger and I am able to continue.

Confucius And Epictetus Similar Or Different

According to Merriam-Webster aversion is a feeling of repugnance toward something with a desire to avoid or turn from it. In the Handbook Of Epictetus the word aversion is the word that gives meaning to section two. According to section two: "Detach your aversion from everything not up to us, and transfer it to what is against nature among the things that are up to us"(Section 2). This section is trying to tell that you shouldn't hate anything that was determined by nature. Nature is a significance of God. What I could get from this section is that God has already designated our future and destiny so we shouldn't get mad at anything he puts us in our way. We should only be mad at things we do wrong with our own consent. I don't really agree with this because it is saying that if another person steals from you, you shouldn't be mad because he was determined by nature to do that.

The Handbook Of Epictetus is a work that reflects stoic philosophy. This handbook reminded me of a book of teachings we read last year that was made by Confucius. I found in the first ten sections that there were many ideas that were very similar to Confucius and others that were extremely different. One example of the differences that I found was in section seven when it says: "If you are given a wife and a child instead of a vegetable and a small shellfish, that will not hinder you; but if the captain calls, let all those things go and run to the boat without turning back" (section 7). In Confucius we were taught that the most important thing was the well being of the group rather than the individual. What this section is saying to us is if you are able to save yourself do it and do not think of what will happen to the other people. I have mixed feelings on both teachings. I would personally prefer to save myself with other two people than save myself and let the other persons die. If it is an extreme case where only one person can be saved and you have to fight for your life I will strive to survive but I will always contemplate before if I could save more people than only me.

There were also many things I found alike with Confucius. The teaching in section three tells us that one shouldn't be so materialistic to be a good person. I another person happens to destroy your precious object you shouldn't be mad according to this handbook. In Confucius there was also the thought of being a very materialistic person as being a bad person. I agree with these two statements because one can't be so materialistic to not forgive a person after he or she makes a mistake. In section eight of this handbook it says that you shouldn't expect an event in life to happen as you want to but rather it will just happen as nature wants it to happen. There is a very similar thought in Confucius when he says that the meaning of life will come to you the less you search for it. What these two lessons are trying to say is that the more you try to make events happen as you want the less they will happen and if you let the events just happens they will happen a nature wants them to happen.

Slaughterhouse-five Ch 10: The Mysteries Revealed

As I read the last chapter of Slaughterhouse-five I expected many questions that I still had to be answered. One of my biggest questions was who was Billy and who the narrator was. As the book describes how Vonnegut and O'Hare were returning from Dresden Vonnegut says: "Billy and the rest were being marched into the ruins by the guards. I was there. O´Hare was there."(212). Finally after all these questions while reading the book they help us see who the narrator was. There are two narrators who are Vonnegut and Billy. Vonnegut is the one that tells the story of Billy and is the one that knows the past, present, and future. Billy Pilgrim is a friend of Vonnegut that lived the war with him. Vonnegut is narrating the story of Billy and the one who is able to do the time traveling is the imagination of Billy. It is as if Billy had told the story to Vonnegut and Vonnegut wrote the story of what happened to Billy that was at the same time what was happening to him. Vonnegut wanted us to be kind of confused throughout the book on the time in which Billy was and who was the narrator because he might be trying to show us how their lives were in war. The change of narrator may be seen as if there was no certain order in the book. War is meant to be structured actions but many things may happen in the battle field and it becomes chaos. The time traveling can be the spare time that the prisoners of war had during the war to be able to think about themselves and their future. The time travels were in Billy´s mind from past to future but he never really talked about the present. This might be a tool Vonnegut used to write his book because it is like filling the blank spaces but not targeting to fill the space where he is telling the story from. Finally, all the future and past events happen and we end up in the present that is the middle of the story

While reading this last chapter I also came across the mention of religion by Tralfamadorians and their way of life. According to Billy Pilgrim: "On Tralfamadore… There isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind…is Charles Darwin" (210). Religion to the Tralfamadorians is based on science. Darwin is known for the theory of evolution and that we will always die and next generation will be better. Evolution is a word that I really like because it is a circle that will never stop. Every time we learn new things as human beings and each time a new generation comes they have no other choice than to improve what was done by past generations. Jesus Christ is the form of religion where everything is faith. Faith is a topic I have mentioned in my past blog called God According To Vonnegut
and is always a symbol of religion.
The belief of the Tralfamadorians is that they believe in science over belief because Darwin is a scientific theory and Jesus Christ is a spiritual theory. The Tralfamadorian way of thinking is very different from the human way of thinking because it says that when a person is dead they do not feel pity for him because in another moment in his life he was alive. The human belief of death is that when a person is dead he is gone forever until the afterlife. Kurt Vonnegut might have done the Tralfamadorians as a superior race that know everything better than us and are trying to help Billy understand the correct way of living. When Vonnegut was returning from Dresden he passed through East Germany and said: "I imagined dropping bombs on those lights, those villages and cities and towns" (211). This is one of the ironical things Vonnegut does because Vonnegut is person that has lived the bombing in the floor with all the destruction happening around him. He has lived that hell that was being bombed but now he has the intention of bombing and making other people suffer as he did. I think this also shows how we as human beings sometimes let our thirst for revenge overpower our common sense.

 

 

    
 

Slaughterhouse-five Ch 9: God According To Vonnegut

It is one of the worst feelings in the world when you say something you have seen or lived and people will simply refuse to believe you. You can even give your word of honor and try to convince in many ways that person but if he simply refuses he won't believe you. A similar thing happened to Billy. Vonnegut says: "It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. 'I was there,' he said" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 191). He was talking to Rumfoord who was an expert in the subject and of course he did not believe Billy because he thought he was crazy. Sometimes people will not believe what they are told until they live it with their own flesh and see it with their own eyes. This reminds me of the story from the Bible where an apostle did not believe that Jesus had resurrected. All the other apostles had seen Jesus and were telling him that they saw him but he still did not believe. In the end Jesus did resurrect and that apostle was proven. The same thing happens in Billy Pilgrim's case where Rumfoord finally accepts that there is someone superior to him in that subject and reluctantly hears what Billy has to say. To believe is to think that something does exist without any proof of it. I have never seen a person that has believed that things that people say are true because we live in a world of lies. In the world in which we live in people bias information and manipulate it to fit their goals so therefore we can't trust everything people say. I really would admire a person who would be so trusting in a person to believe everything they tell you. Personally I need a kind of proof to believe in something except when it comes to religion. God or other gods is one thing that you can't question in a human being because they will always have the belief in a superior force that has the power to determine things that we humans are not able to do.

This chapter also had two other mentions of God. One of them was when Vonnegut wrote: "Billy cried very little, though he often saw things worth crying about, and in that respect, at least, he resembled the Christ of the carol" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 197). God is symbolized in this part of the book because it was the only time Billy cried in all the war and it was when he saw the state in which the horses were. A horse is a symbol for nature and God is the creator of all nature so it symbolizes that Billy realized all the nature destroyed during the war. Billy did not cry during the killings of his companions or the tortures they made to some during the war but did cry when he saw a horse bleeding. This shows that sometimes the simplest things in the world can have a lot of value to people but in this case it is like the key that opened up the hardened heart of Billy during the war. Vonnegut might have included this part of love of nature to symbolize that we still depend on nature and that we may think that as humans we have more power than God and nature but we are wrong. We will always depend on the resources nature provides to us and without nature we will die. Billy also depends on nature after war when he has to be carried by the two horses in the wagon. The other part that referred to God was when in the locket of Montana Wildhack these words were inscribed: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 209). This is one of the quotations I liked most about this book and can really be used in real life. If you are not able to change things you simply will not be able to change them so it is better to live with it and learn to like it than to fight with it eternally. Courage is one of the most important qualities a person can have because it means that that person has the will and the intention to be able to make the world a better place. The last part of it is the most important part because it is the power that God gave us to know the difference between good and wrong.

 

Slaughterhouse-five Ch8: Vonnegut The Master Of Irony

In war may things can happen sometimes this things that happen are unfortunate events. Other times there are good events and events that bring joy to a nation. There are also many things about war that we sometimes do not realize and are the things that can go really wrong. One example of the ironies of war is when Billy said: "He was Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American who had become a Nazi" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 162). This was one of the things that gave me a sense of the humor Vonnegut uses in this book. The humor he uses is not one that you can laugh about it because it rather ironical. An American that is on the enemy's side has a simple definition that is a traitor. Of the personalities a person can have the one I most hate is the one of a traitor. A traitor is a person that once had your trust and now is attacking you. The other thing is how can a person kill people from his same country? Campbell did not try to convince the American prisoners of war to this, rather he urged them to go and fight Russia that were their allies. The Americans refused this because they did not want to be remembered for ever as the American that betrayed his country. I think Vonnegut made this part very clear to show how traitors were during the war and how much he hated traitors. Since he and Billy were also part of the Americans he also wanted to show that he was a loyal American that would give anything for his country. He also did not show this directly he preferred to do this through his humor that is called irony. I really admire how Vonnegut uses irony to perfection. I tried using irony for one of the papers I had to do for a class and it is really hard.

Another part that caught my attention was when Billy told us: "American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes sprayed them with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 180). Imagine yourself being one of those pilots. After you get to the American base or after some while you will be informed that the ones who were down there were your fellow countrymen. What would you do? You can't time travel like Billy to see the future and know that those where Americans. Fortunately the ones in this event did miss but there might be lots of other cases where the bullets did not miss. I would feel really bad and feel like if I was less Colombian if in the middle of a war by any mistake I would kill my fellow countrymen. There might also be a chance that the Americans did know this and were traitors like Campbell and Vonnegut wanted the reader to notice the many cases of treason that happened during war. Another part that made me laugh but this time it was not because it was ironic but because I had heard it in my life was when Kilgore Trout said: "You think money grows on trees" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 167)? I don't know if Vonnegut intended this to be funny or maybe it was funny for me because I had heard it previously. This is the typical phrase of a parent when you lose something. They will tell you this and the first time they told me this I was very little and it was very humorous because I imagined bills growing instead of the leaves. When I hear other parents tell that to their kids I will also laugh because it happened to me and it is in a book it probably has happened to many other people.

Slaughterhouse-five Ch 7: Vonnegut The Master Of Confusion

Yesterday I saw that a friend did a quiz in Facebook that was about death. In that quiz they would give you your day of death. I laughed at this because when I was like ten years old I also did this and it said that I was dying in three years and apparently I am not dead yet. Billy had the same event happen to him. The only difference between his day of death of death and mine was that he was sure of it and it was truth while mine was just a lie. Wouldn't it be really strange if you know how you are going to die and when. Billy also knows that when he travels in the plane to the optometry convention it will crash. "He knew it was going to crash, but he didn't want to make a fool of himself by saying so" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 154). I think Vonnegut will have an intention to make Billy know the future and for him to be able to know when things will happen and how. Even though Billy knows this he doesn't have the power to change his future. What Vonnegut might be trying to make us understand is that it will not matter if you know the future of not you can't do anything to change the present. Destiny by definition is: "a predetermined course of events often held to be an irresistible power or agency" (http://www.merriam-webster.com), and it is really an unalterable thing. I really agree with how Vonnegut shows to the readers through Billy that we all have a destiny that we can't evade and even if we try to evade it, it will still find us.

I have still have the doubt of who really is the narrator and how many are there? From the class discussions and my readings I have come to the conclusions that there are two narrators. One of them is Kurt Vonnegut and the other one is Billy. Billy is a friend of Vonnegut and Vonnegut wrote this story through the eyes of him. Billy has also two ways of narrating that are the first person where he just tells what happened to him and the third person that is the Billy who has all the time travels. "Billy was unconscious for two days after that, and he dreamed millions of things, some of them true. The true things were time-travel" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 157). According to this it may mean that all the things that Billy had told us until now were maybe not true except his time travels. I know that this was after the accident of the plane crash but, he also had many accidents and hard things to endure during war. Just when I was beginning to understand a bit of how the story was narrated and how Vonnegut dealt with the narrators and time travels they say that this might be different. I think this Vonnegut did this on purpose to keep us guessing. When he was getting us to understand more how this book was he confuses us again because this book is meant to be confusion. Vonnegut is very good at changing the story with just a time travel or with an event. It is a very good way to write a book because it keeps you interested and always trying to guess what will come next. I am really interested to know what will happen next and after all this confusion about how this novel is written I do not know how I am going to react to a normal novel anymore.

The Dilemma of Capitalization

I read the blog about On studying history/History and I agreed. Capitalization is a subject that is not universal it depends a lot on what newspaper are you writing in. Normally if I came across the question whether to capitalize a class or not I would probably said that I wouldn't capitalize it. "I'm not surprised. Capitalization is one of those areas very much subject to fashion and change" (http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&updated-max=2010-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=28). I really like how he stated his opinion and successfully supported it like the maxim above is supporting the constant change and not knowing of capitalization. Capitalization according to him will constantly change with time so there is not a way to make a global rule of capitalization.

Slaughterhouse-five Ch6: Ishmael’s Teachings Taught Again

The two things that most impacted me on this chapter was the nature of human kind. Human kind has always and will always make errors that will eternally mark the world. For example a war does never go by unnoticed. After a war there are always a series of chain reactions after the war that affects the whole world. Maybe Vonnegut's intention on making his book have as main event the Second World War is to show the good and the bad sides of war. Vonnegut does a perfect balance of how he presents to us the war because he says it is bad and that a massacre has no right way of describing but he also includes humor and events where you can see a good aspect of war. It is not that he shows that war is all peace and fun but he does show the light in the end of the tunnel. A think that I really liked about how Vonnegut develops this novel is that he is always changing from past to present to future but he does it with a reason. He might be doing this to show the contrast and the changes that Billy had during and after the war. Human beings never stop changing and after an event such as a war they will change even more. Vonnegut makes this time changes with the intention to see that Billy has evolved from what he was before and during the war to the person that communicates with Tralfamadorians in the future. Returning to the nature of human kind I found a maxim that states exactly what people sometimes think and live for. "Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is-"said Lazzaro, "it's revenge" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 139). The thing that most hit me was when Lazzaro said this. It most impacted me because he is right we as human beings like revenge and the feeling of overpowering a person that has made you feel bad or that has beaten you. We human beings are very selfish and never want to be beaten or worse than someone. When all of a sudden someone corrects or beats you it is like the bubble of your ego has been popped. After this you feel that the only way to blow it up again is to do the same thing that person did to you. This book might be trying to show us that all that greed and that feeling of being superior has led us to many wars and terrible events. After reading partway through the chapter Billy says to his audience: "If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 142). This reminded me a lot of what Ishmael was trying to teach us. Ishmael wanted to make humankind understand that death was not so bad and if you have lived a life you wanted without the pressures of mother culture. Billy Pilgrim has also gotten this idea from the Tralfamadorians that we are dead in one moment but we know that in on another time being past or future we will be alive. Vonnegut might have included these thoughts in his book to help us understand that if we keep on making the same mistakes we will keep going on a failed flying machine like Ishmael said. Vonnegut might be using as a theme war to show that his crash of the plane would be when wars unleash without any control between all countries.

Slaughterhouse-five Ch5: Vonnegut Supreme Ruler

The narrator of this book is a subject that has been continuously questioned in the class and in my mind. In the first chapter I thought it was Kurt Vonnegut then in the second one it was a mix between Billy Pilgrim in third person and in first person. It has all been confusion until in this chapter there are some clues that can help you make a decision on who is the narrator. "Billy closed that one eye, saw in his memory of the future poor old Edgar Derby in front of a firing squad in the ruins of Dresden" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 105). Over here I could see that there were clearly two Billy Pilgrims in the book. In the discussion we had today in class my final conclusion was that there were three different narrators. One was Kurt Vonnegut, the other one was Billy Pilgrim in third person and Billy Pilgrim in first person. The main differences that can be seen between the three characters are that all are different but are the same because they narrate the same story. One of the few times I have seen Kurt Vonnegut being mentioned was in this chapter when Billy Pilgrim said: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 125). This is when I saw that Kurt Vonnegut is really mentioned. Apart from this moment Vonnegut is almost never mentioned but you always feel his presence as if he was the one narrating the book. The two Billy Pilgrim's main difference is that one is the puppet of the other one. One is the Billy that can't change anything and just lets himself drag by and there is the other Billy who does the time traveling and knows the past, present, and future. Vonnegut is the superior force that rules over both Billy in first person and in third person and determines their fate and actions in this book.

A thing that really stayed with me while reading through the chapter that was a long one was when Billy was with Rosewater and he told him about what the book said about Christianity. "But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 109). This is one thing I had to stop and think about because I am Catholic and believe in God. After thinking this for a while I thought that Vonnegut might have shown this in his book to show one of the features of war. In Christianity according to Vonnegut "Found it so easy to be cruel" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 108), but I think he is in previous statements is questioning the reader about the morals of war. Everyone in this world believes in a superior force that rules over everything else, some may call it God or others may call it destiny. If everyone believes in a superior force that has to do good and teach its people to be good then why do wars happen? All those deaths, sufferings and destroyed hearts are things that can affect a person eternally. I am not sure if Vonnegut's intention of using religion in his book was aimed to question why war happened but it might be possible because war is something that is opposite to religion and would be a question more like where is God. This really reminded me to the story of Job in the Bible when he felt that God had abandoned him. I do not think God abandoned him but was doing a test on him to see if he was worthy and maybe that is why wars can happen in human kind.

Slaughterhouse-five Ch4: The Past, Present, And Future

Emptiness was the first word that came to my mind when I started to read chapter 4 of Slaughterhouse-five. According to the webpage http://www.thefreedictionary.com emptiness means having no occupants or inhabitants or being vacant and that exact definition came up to my mind when Billy was wondering around his house. "The moonlight came into the hall way through doorways of the empty rooms of Billy's two children, children no more. They were gone forever." (Slaughterhouse-five pg73). When I read these sentences I remembered that grandmother's always said that the house felt empty after the kids have gone. I had never asked this question to my grandmother so I called her and asked her. Her answer was that since my father is the oldest one when he left she did not feel the house so empty but when the other two kids left it felt a very uncomfortable and eternal silence. She also told me that it seemed as if there was a hole in the house. I also thought about this and remembered that after my dog went out for a week to the veterinarian the house felt as if there was no action and it felt empty.

What I found most interesting about this book is that the time shifts are so confusing and frequent that you almost feel the trouble Billy has to remember the things that have happened. Another example is when Kurt Vonnegut shows that the book is going to be full of time twists. He shows this through narrating the war movie Billy was watching backwards. It seemed very weird to read that the bombs came back into the shells and into the plane's belly but maybe this whole book is going to be like that. It will show Billy trying to remember what happened during the war while he is living his life and in the spaceship of the Tralfamadorians. Billy has strange transitions between each setting in his mind because he does them without warning. For example he was in one moment thinking about the shower they gave him in the German camp and the shower when he was a baby and also one in Tralfamadore. In the first chapters I felt strange and couldn't really follow the story with all those time changes but as I am getting used to reading it I now kind of sense when a change is near because he can change on a very small subject or item but there is always a relation between the object and the times. "Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 86). This is one of the questions that have always wondered in my head: What is more important the past present or future? This answer the Tralfamadorian gave me is very similar to the answer I formulate for the present but I really think the past is very important because it is the only way to learn from our mistakes and be able to be better. The future will never be known and I think of it more as a matter of destiny. The past, present, and the future are things very important to us but to Billy the Pilgrim's mind none seem to make any sense.

Slaughterhouse-five Ch3: Time And Life Will Fly By

Kurt Vonnegut is playing a lot with flashbacks of the war and the mind of Billy. One thing that really helped me get this idea was: “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future”(Slaughterhouse-five pg 60). Kurt Vonnegut might have said this because he meant two things. The first thing he wanted to show us is that Billy is already a person that is unwilling to change his life. The other thing that he might be referring to is destiny. What he is saying is that the destiny of Billy Pilgrim is already written and he can’t do anything about it or change it in anyway. This is reflected throughout the chapter when he tells us how Billy was in the war. Billy is just letting himself go without any resistance just as if he cared no more for life. The same thing is shown when he tells us about his life and how he goes to his house and thinks life has no purpose anymore. I feel some sort of compassion with Billy because after war many things change. It is not that I have been in war but after some very hard times in your life you can change. When my great grandfather died I was very sad and was changed but this event because it taught me that life will not wait for you and it might seem long but it may change in any moment. There is a thing that happened in this chapter that really can associate with our life. “He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium’s black ghetto. The people who lived here hated it so much that they had burned down a lot of it a month before” (Slaughterhouse-five pg 59).This is one of the things I find very absurd that people sometimes do. People will sometimes destroy on what they depend on. Why would you destroy the one thing you want and need most in life? One example of this is when I see people in tennis tournaments that smash their racquets until they break them. It is what you play with and you shouldn’t go around destroying your stuff because you lost a point. You have to value the stuff you have today because you may never know what will happen tomorrow. This chapter has really left me a lesson that is to never take things for granted. One clear example that Billy shows us is when he says: “Where have all these years gone? (Slaughterhouse-five pg 57). That was when I stopped a moment from reading and started to ponder this question. Even though I am not very old as this chapter taught me life can have many twists so I started to wander and think what I wanted to do with my life. Then I realized that was not too far away but I still had some time to make up my mind. Then my mind started to think of my life. I asked myself if my fifteen years had passes quickly or slow and the answer was that they passed quickly. But the lesson that this chapter really taught me is to never take things for granted and that time and life will fly by.

Slaughterhouse-five Ch2: How We Live After Life Changing Events

I once met two people that were not exactly alike but were very similar in aspects like thoughts and actions. These two people never met each other but it is kind of one person that really reminds you of another person. I think the same thing can be said about Billy and Weary. Billy is discriminated because he is different. He says he was captured by Tralfamadorians and writes about his experiences in the planet of Tralfamadore. "The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist."(Slaughterhouse-five pg 26) This is very much true if you are referring to the mental level of life. You will always remain in the minds of the people that really cared about you even after you are dead. This reminds me very much of the book Gilgamesh when he was talking with Enkidu asking him to describe how is the afterlife. He describes that the people who have less people that mourn for them are the ones that have to suffer the most. I see that when a person remembers you it means that you changed his life in some way. Since Kurt Vonnegut plays so much with time in this novel he might be trying to say that each time he introduces a new character to the book he will have a memory or a connection with the character before. Billy and Weary have a trait that they share. Billy was the only one survivor of a plane accident and his daughter asked him: "Why is it you never mention this before the airplane crash?"(Slaughterhouse-five pg 30)She was referring to the thinking about the aliens. Weary experienced rejection during his childhood and was also the sole survivor of a tank attack to his squad. I think that after some horrible accidents like is the one of the plane, Weary's childhood or the tank bombing there is a change in the person. The change that we see after the crash is that Billy starts to talk and say that he can communicate with aliens. The change we can see in Weary is that he becomes a torture fanatic that is always searching for the way to make a person suffer the most before dying. Both of this changes had been for bad or crazy because just imagine you being the one chosen by destiny to survive an accident might affect your mind a bit. I once saw the beginning of a movie that was called Final Destination. What happened here is that a guy has a vision that he sees that the plane is going to blow up. He goes out of the plane with his close friends and the plane ends up exploding. This shows that sometimes you can't evade fate and if you are the chosen one to be the sole survivor you have to live with it.