#Slaughterhosue five singlehandedly rewired my entire brain

[phantom-does-a-thing]

admittedly idk anything about slaughterhouse five apart from what you’ve just posted but I am interested to hear if u have any ideas for what bitb in that style would look like?

PHANTOM IS LITERALLY THIS RN AS WE SPEAK

ok listen ok ok ok. Slaughterhouse five is a war novel about wwii and it's told through a series of moments out of chronological order in a meaningful way that keeps jumping back and forth enough that you don't have a solid timeline of what's going on. It tells the story of Billy's life and his experience in the war but everything is jumbled out of order as Billy gets stuck and unstuck in time. And I think that would fit with BITB so well.

I don't know who it would follow, my thought would be Rand although I think there could be some really interesting stuff for Rolan. But Rand is my target here, he is my billy pilgrim in this situation. What's interesing about slaughterhouse five that I just noticed is that while everything is out of order and jumbled, The bombing of dresden and the experiences getting captured in wwii is the ONLY thing that is told in chronological order. It is cut up into pieces and sandwiched between other moments in Billy's life. Everything else is out of order and just smushed together, but the main narrative is still in chronological order which while there are still bits that jump between past and future, it leads the reader to believe that the present is supposed to be wwii. And that's what it would be for Galloway.

The stuff that happened in Galloway would be the main timeline, the main focus, the main plot. It would be the only thing told in chronological order but broken up enough that it doesn't really feel like it's that way, snippets of things from the past and the future keep coming back and forth to fill in the gaps. But as well, there's a thing in Slaughterhouse Five where "so it goes" where everything bad that happens is treated apathetically because there's an idea that comes up later in the book that even if someone dies, they're still alive in memories and for the Tralfamadorians time is stacked on top of each other, it's not linear. Everything that happens has happened and is going to happen, and has to happen. It's the entire notion of doomed by the narrative before doomed by the narrative was a THING.

This person is supposed to die, but they are still alive in the past, and since the past is happening at the same time, they aren't really dead. And that's what it would be like with what happens at Galloway. Everything is told in a way that makes no sense, but looking at it all together it would be... not understandable... but it would idk it would make a meaningful world.

"There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no cause, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

That's the central idea, the story being told all together, no beginning middle and end, but everything happening at once with the knowledge of what is going to come.