DISCUSSION OPEN Slaughterhouse-Five Group Read

[Valerie]

He reminds me a bit of Hamlet, especially in how I reacted to him (like Lisa above!)

[David]

Jeez, okay Ruby. Read your review. Damn. Didn't want to get involved with Ben Marcus. I have a problem with his overbearing attitude towards fiction and novels. Now I will read it.

You quote this from him: "Making mimes out of all of us. So that we couldn’t hear ourselves breathe. So that our shared language would have been suddenly snuffed out. What a fine bit of foreshadowing that all would have been."

Is Billy somehow a mime, then? Did you ever see someone go up to a mime on the street and push them over, or worse? Is Billy just a language gutted human who has given in to his determinism? Or is it worse? (Billy and all the other afflicted ones in literature?) Worse would be a cipher, an empty vessel...

And since female passive characters were brought up above, are these passive natures similar because they're tropes of some kind or is it a function of something else. Personally, I am impressed more and more by what's happening with women in literature...even in chick lit. I'm seriously not impressed with what's happening with men though. Billy so exemplifies what bothers me--insanely accepting determinism and fate without a fight? Not even getting a bit lustful in a porn shop? Please.

[Ruby , Mistress of Chaos]

Hmmmm. I'm thinking the similarity is mostly that both have deeply rooted belief systems that teach them not to question events (for different reasons - Samuel's is about "faith" rather than "fate"). Samuel and Billy are very different characters, I think. It's interesting to compare the two though.

[Derek]

Ruby wrote: "Hmmmm. I'm thinking the similarity is mostly that both have deeply rooted belief systems that teach them not to question events (for different reasons - Samuel's is about "faith" rather than "fate"..."

Interesting - I had assumed that "faith" and "fate" were related (etymologically), and certainly think of Billy's concept of "fate" as being almost religious (which is why I brought up Calvinism, earlier), but there's not actually a connection between the two words.

As for The Flame Alphabet, I didn't really feel Samuel was that passive (not like Claire, his wife). He was simply completely unequipped to deal with the situation - but he did spend a lot of time trying to do something constructive about it, anyway.