The Curiosity Of Time

This is my 37th minute starring at my computer screen trying to figure out what to write my blog about. Time passes and I still don’t know what to write, I get the idea of time. Time, again time. Thus far in the four chapters I have read, time always appears in them creating a different effect. Throughout the chapter, time appears when Billy sits down to watch a war movie and he watches it backwards. While reading this part, my mind shifted to a movie I saw recently called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and how he is born an old man, and lives his life backwards then dies as a baby. Vonnegut takes us through the description of the movie as Billy sees it. If we were to watch it forward it would be a movie about American Bombers in World War Two but seeing it backwards gives it a whole new meaning. It changes the moments the reflect war so they can reflect peace. “The minerals were then shipped to specialist in remote areas. It was their business to put them into ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again.”(Vonnegut 75). This is a part of the movie that Billy sees as he watches it backward so we can see how instead of using the minerals to fight and destroy their enemy, they are not going to use them: they are going to take them away so they can so no harm.

As Billy continues watching the movie he imagined “everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed” (Vonnegut 75). Even though this does not really happen in the movie it can also be understood as a way to see how watching the movie backwards changes the meaning of it, and how chronological order has it purposes for the cause and effects it creates. It also contradicts the thought that moments are organized a certain way and can’t be changed no matter how you watch them. This example proofs this wrong because Billy is watching the moments of the movie in a different way, and hence he is able to change the meaning of it by making war-like moments reflect the complete opposite.

Even if I still have more than half of this book to read this chapter made me realize how the author may try to play with time again in order to change the meaning of the events that will occurs in the novel. As it happened in the movie, this man lives his life backwards to the fullest that fact that he is born and old man does not affect him but does affect the lives of the people around him making it change the typical way in which we see life.