Alright so this blog post is going to be a little unordinary. My friends and I randomly started talking about the topic of Tralfamadorians and their perception of time. Eventually we all kind of got into an argument about the existence of time and what time truly means and thought this could be fun to read and comment on. Slaughterhouse Five really got us thinking about time itself and it was a fun argument/discussion. I made a video to show the full conversation and put Rushes by Frank Ocean in the back to make it more enjoyable.
Kindred has definitely been one of the most intense novels I've read. I think Octavia Butler did an incredible job of using time travel to explore the relationships between every character living within antebellum south. In particular, I think Octavia Butler is insanely good at creating dread. One of the many scenes that got me feeling dread was when Rufus finds both the map and the modern book about slavery. It's scary to think that the course of history could have been so much more different if Rufus had told his father or if it was found by him. Along with the book, Dana was also kinda forced to burned the map and Rufus basically says, "you don't have to worry because you are home". It feels creepy and even more so when you realize what his character thinks of Dana towards the end of the story. Dana is also tied down to saving Rufus because if she doesn't, she'll also be wiped from existence. As a reader, I just wanted Hagar to be born as soon as po...
This was truly a meeting of great minds. Although we got a little off topic, this discussion certainly has applications to the existence of time in Slaughterhouse 5. Does time really have meaning without anyone or anything to perceive it? I'm sure Billy himself frequently contemplated the existence of time and its basis in reality.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting concept. I think time does exist and continually move forward. We do not look, act, or think the same way that we did 5 years ago, and 5 years from now we will also look, act, and think differently than we do now. However, I do agree that how we measure time is completely arbitrary. There is no significance to a week being 7 days long. We could change it at any time if we wanted to.
ReplyDeleteThis is the most Tralfamadorian blog post I've ever seen.
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