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How to Cope Like Billy Pilgrim

In Slaughterhouse Five I was shocked to read that some of the Kilgore Trout books had similar plots to what Billy has been describing about his experiences on Tralfamadore. Throughout the whole reading and our discussions in class I had taken up front that Kurt Vonnegut was telling us that the alien abduction and Billy’s experiences on Tralfamadore were real within the context of the novel. At first it seemed clearly NOT real that there would be aliens in book but hearing that Billy Pilgrim was unstuck in time, and hearing the Tralfamadorian interpretation of time, the story started to add up and I began to believe it was real (in the story, probably not real life).             Once we were told about the book plots that followed the same storyline as Billy’s time in outer space, I felt kind of silly for just accepting Tralfamadore plotline as truth (honestly I wanted it to be real). But it was a truth of some sort, it may not ...
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A Very Believable Conspiracy

Recently I asked my parents what they thought about the government report on the JFK assassination. Neither of them think that it tells the whole story and I was interested to hear that my dad’s speculations lined up pretty well with what seems to be the current plan in Libra to try to kill JFK. My dad thinks a couple things could be possible including that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t work alone, was probably supposed to die before being taken into custody, and that Jack Ruby was sent by whatever group planned the assassination in order to kill Lee Harvey Oswald before he talked. Hearing him say what many other Americans believe, that the government report isn’t the whole story, and some of these pretty common conspiracy theories was interesting because they aren’t far from the conspiracies that DeLillo is putting forth. The difference is that when most people say these things they just are speculating and don’t put forth any facts but DeLillo frames the situation with what seems lik...
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Smooth Mumbo Jumbo

On Thursday in class Kat and I presented the article "Crossing Western Space, or the HooDoo Detective on the Boundary in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo" by Richard Swope. The group before us with Maggie, Sophia, and Irina talked about some similar ideas that our article had brought up, so the conversation connected well throughout the hour and I was hoping to continue that discussion here. Both groups talked about how Papa LaBas is like an unconventional detective in the way that he uses spiritual guidance of loas and his “knockings” to do detective work, whereas a typical Atonist detective would use hard evidence and scientific research. Also, as several people pointed out in class, he tended to accidentally find things/ have everything explained to him, which is not how usual detective stories work. To expand on the discussions in class, we talked about how Mumbo Jumbo is satirizing and almost directly confronting the ways that Atonists (or Western civilization in gene...
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