ITT: we take books literally that are meant metaphorically.

haha bible

>>8038537

what kind of metaphor were the aliens?

The whole "aliens were a metaphor for PTSD making him lose touch with reality" thing never sat well with me. I think it's pushed by high school english teachers who teach just Slaughterhouse Five, because if you read the rest of Vonnegut, his worlds are all filled with actual aliens interacting with humans. It's light sci-fi, not allegory. I think Vonnegut was just trying to use the aliens to explain his outlook on dealing with tragedy.

Also, the aliens clearly didn't want anything. They just noticed he came unstuck and explained it to him. They didn't unstick him themselves.

File: 51Gyltc8l4L._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg (43KB, 324x499px) Image search: [Google]

43KB, 324x499px

Why did he kill the Arab? Will he escape from jail in the sequel?

>>8041302
There are several things in the book that indicate that the aliens aren't necessarily all there though. Pilgrim shows overall signs of early onset dementia, his daughter wants to put him in a nursing home, and his day-to-day experience is interspersed with flashbacks to important events in his formative years. The whole alien experience is pure wish fullfillment too - which doesn't mean it's not real, but it suggests that not all of it is actually happening.

>>8041373
But all of those are only signs he's losing it IF the aliens are not truly there, and he's not actually unstuck in time. If he's right, then the dementia and flashbacks are real occurences, and his daughter has no reason to put him in a home. Both explanations make valid sense within the story; I was just saying that in the broader context of Vonnegut's work, whimsical wish fulfillment aliens come up in many other storylines where they're undeniably real, so I lean towards that explanation.
That being said, the rules are a bit weird in Vonnegut's writings. Characters are reused constantly, but they're always slightly different and do different things each time they come up. The details of his sci-fi also change to fit whatever he's writing about, and sometimes the sci-fi is gone altogether.

>>8041366
He killed the Arab because he could.

>>8041366
But Mersault actually did kill the Arab, there was nothing metaphorical about it

Aschenbach was just really scared of mediterranean gingers.

>>8041366
it was the sun, dummy