Gather no Moss
In a post titled “Time is On My Side” Captain Beau Cleland illustrates the life of a modern day soldier who may be stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. As he looks back over his last few months of deployment Captain Cleland realizes that time is relative, and that, while it may seem long at first, he has actually covered a lot more time. By this I mean, of course, that when he looks back at the first three months of deployment they have flown by, but as he lived them they seemed to crawl and drag on to infinity. Vonnegut uses foreshadowing in his novel to represent a great amount of time passing. When the POW’s are on the trains waiting to go their camps a man dies, in another car, and the POWs ask for his body to be removed. However the guards go and eat their dinner first, then come out after to enjoy a cigar, and at last they actually remove the body of the dead soldier. A clever use of foreshadowing, because he shows that these solders are going to be on this train for some time, and that someone is going to be dead before any of them get off the train. He says later that there was something about that ninth day(when the hobo and Weary die). Not only is the content similar but the style, more pacifically, the humor is remarkable similar.
I call it the one sentence break down, others call it a punch line, and I prefer my definition. When an author spends some time making a point then finally sums it all up in a short sentence, in these cases it is pretty funny. Captain Beau ends his post with a picture of a group of soldiers burning their waist, with the caption “waiting to flush,” funny to say the least. Meaning, obviously, it can bit of crappy deal always waiting. Vonnegut too uses many of these break downs, he is sort of the master of them. Vonnegut uses an illustration too; his is a sign in the POW camp. He uses it to expose the gilded nature of their situation. The sign is hung outside the latrine and is said “Please leave the latrine as tidy as you found it,” so of course the Americans are in their pooping their brains out.
The world is not as it should be sometimes, but one thing is for sure, all things pass with time. Minutes drag on, loved ones are missed, and Cities are destroyed. All things come and go. I find it a comfort to remember that no matter how evil or monotonous something is, all things pass with time.
Filed by whitepe at March 26th, 2008 under Uncategorized
