Peter's Blog

The Tralfamadorians of  Slaughterhouse Five  see all of the past and future at once. Instead of living in the moment, they see every event that will happen ahead of time, and as a result don't care about the future. This makes sense; if you think about it, reality is just a bunch of events that lead to other events. Even our thoughts, feelings, and decisions are determined by past events. So why shouldn't humans think the same way as these nihilistic Tralfamadorians? The underlying difference between humans and Tralfamadorians is how they perceive time. Tralfamadorians are able to view their own decisions--and the consequences of those decisions--before making those decisions in the first place. As such, they don't ever truly  make decisions; everything has already been decided for them by fate. Humans, however, are unable to see these decisions ahead of time. This is a bit of a blessing in disguise; our inability to predict the future means our decisions actually matte...

Slaughterhouse 5  introduces beings that can see all moments in time at once, the Tralfamadorians. I've been pondering how exactly this would work, given what the book tells us. Instead of being time travelers, the Tralfamadorians live their lives in real-time, and are only able to perceive the future and past. Their philosophy revolves around the fact that the future cannot be changed, even though they know about all future events ahead of time. If you think about it, though, this doesn't really make sense. If I knew I would be hit by an MTD bus on my way to Kenney tomorrow, I would obviously stay on alert the whole way, and likely take another route entirely. However, according to Tralfamadorians, there is nothing I can do about my impending injury. How can this be? Perhaps their visions of the future, combined with their philosophy of acceptance, are a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. When a Tralfamadorian sees their own death, they immediately accept their fate, and ...

I've seen a couple of recent blog posts talking about the ending of Ragtime , and whether it's a "good" or "bad" ending. The answer, of course, depends on which character you observe. Tateh and his new family get a happy ending, while Coalhouse and Father straight up die. So why is this? Ragtime  has no single protagonist. There are multiple characters that we see as good, virtuous, etc, but they don't work together for a single cause. Rather, the "good guys" all have their own plots to follow. Tateh's quest to improve his life takes place while Coalhouse thirsts for revenge, the former succeeding while the latter arguably fails. The same can be said of the "antagonists": Father and Harry K. Thaw are both dislikable characters, but only Father has a "bad" ending. All of this stems from Doctorow sticking closer to reality and history, as opposed to the fiction we're used to. In most fiction novels, the protagonist...

As we've observed and discussed, Doctorow goes out of his way to only use full names for characters who actually lived. Harry Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit are given full names, while Tateh and Sarah are only ever referred to with their first names. Father, Mother, and Mother's Younger Brother aren't even given names at all. However, there is one exception: Coalhouse Walker Jr. In class today, we briefly touched on the origins of Coalhouse as a character. He is based on another character, Michael Kohlhaas, from a book of the same name by Heinrich von Kleist. Kohlhaas has his horses unfairly confiscated, and is unable to get them back. He then wages a mini-war, killing several, as revenge. However, Kohlhaas is also a fictional character. So why is Coalhouse given a name? Perhaps Doctorow believes von Kleist's work to be historically significant enough to give a spin-off character a full name. I think this is unlikely, as Coalhouse is only an adaptation of Kohlhaas, not a...

In these final few days before the end of the year, we've watched an exciting struggle for dominance of a man as much around him works against him. I'm talking, of course, about Mr. Mitchell's heroic battles against Room 106N's technology. Mr. Mitchell's "call to adventure" came on Monday, when the speakers stopped working for some reason. His "ordinary world" consisted of verbal class discussion of physical books we've read, so choosing to show a digital video was already a form of "crossing the threshold". This time, however, the common tactic of restarting everything didn't yield desirable results, and this is where I think the true "call to adventure" is. Here, Mr. Mitchell had been forced to seek outside help. He initially "refuses the call" by continuing to try to fix the issue himself. At last, though, he sought help from the IT guy. (Was it Mr. Coobs? I think it was Mr. Coobs.) Mr. Coobs would b...

One thing that keeps catching me off guard is the TV in Room , the one Jack watches while he and his mother are held captive. Even though Jack is led to believe that everything shown on TV is from a different "planet", it still gives him quite a bit of knowledge about the outside world. For example, right before the helicopter incident, Jack spots an airplane in the sky and calls Ma's attention to it, knowing what it is. It confused me for a moment that Jack knew about airplanes, but not about things like vending machines. Jack also calls stairs "stairs" when he first encounters them, instead of trying to describe them like the other cases of defamiliarization we discussed in class. Keeping the Room's TV in mind, it kinda makes sense why Jack knows about some of these things and not others. Jack could easily have seen a scene on TV with stairs, but without characters climbing them; stairs are pretty common, after all. He would've asked Ma about i...