Slaughterhouse Five - Blog Response
After listening to Sontag, and viewing the photographs from Goya and Jeff Wall I feel that in ways we are and we aren’t desensitized to war and violence. I agree with much of the other students in saying that in the face of war we as individuals are fundamentally powerless. Billy Pilgrims’s reaction to this inevitability in the novel is his disassociation from time, sense of detachment, and his stress on the mundane aspects of life. Vonnegut uses repetition in the novel to demonstrate how the mundane is constantly interrupted with other events, also demonstrating the life lived by a soldier.
In the society that we live in today, we are ultimately raised on the idea that war is inevitable and that we don’t really have a choice as to whether it continues or not. Our only access to images of the war is through the media. Ignorance would lead us to believe, as many are lead to believe that the images we are presented with on TV are actually “true” images of war, not selectively chosen to be “suitable” for the citizens in the
United States. The images that we are presented with we view from a far, few of us have been there to experience the harsh reality of what is actually occurring in
Iraq. This idea along with the idea that Sontag presented “it is hard to take in reality through images” leads us to become desensitized towards war and its powerful effects. At this point in our lives I’m sure many have us have seen several horror movies or cliché war films in which over and over we have been introduced to the same idea, that war is just something people do. We don’t at this point really react anymore to the images we see, and who can really blame us? As long as I can remember I have seen images of soldiers killing each other whether in movies or on the news. Now for example we see first hand how the amount of media coverage on the war has changed from the beginning of the war in
Iraq up until now, and how little we hear of it. Many people have lost interest and accepted war as the answer and a part of life.
On the other hand I disagree somewhat and only slightly by saying that if viewing the images of Jeff Wall has an effect on us then obviously there is some sense of sensitivity in us. Meaning that we are not fully desensitized to violence and war when in direct view, but from a far we are and feel as if we are “powerless in its face”. I feel that it in the world we live in today it is fundamentally impossible for us to escape this fate, and if there is any hope I wouldn’t expect to see a change for many years to come unfortunately.
I agree with Sontag’s assertion that in order to be “morally adult” we cannot be surprised by horrors that we have seen and still see ourselves create. I agree with this because we have the option of changing and always will but ultimately always opt to not deviate from the ways in which we are already set.
