III. Alone

Billy Pilgrim is clearly in grief  (in his present). I felt a kind of emptiness and sorrow when I read the narrators words, “ Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping.” Or “Billy’s home was empty.”

Billy has been through a lot of traumatizing experiences. Just living a war, seeing everyone die makes you go insane. He has lost his wife, and now (in the present) he is wealthy and live in a lovely house, but he is alone, he cries and there is no one there to dry his eyes. I think feeling you are alone and depressed is the most horrible feeling a human being can experience.

I like how the narrator travels through time and shows his present and his past at the same time, its like reading two stories at once and then connecting all the dots.

A book I recommend and is written this way is “News of a Kidnapping” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It describes the life of the “secuestrados” or kidnapped at the same time with the present, showing how their miserable families do whatever they can to find them and rescue them.  Eventually at the end the two parts of the story meet.