The Kraemenator

They made Billy get out of the wagon and come look at the horses. When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t cried about anything else in the war.

Later on, as a middle-aged optometrist, he would weep quietly and privately sometimes, but never make loud boohooing noises.

Finding the theme (or themes) within a book, or any work of literary art is difficult at the best of times. Usually, I try to approach this daunting task by finishing the book and then attempting to make sense of what I’ve just read so that I can come up with a theme (or “moral” if you want) that I can justify based on the particular order of words that the author used in his book.

Meaning within words

While this approach works most of the time, it’s not very time efficient, and often when I try to produce a theme statement by simply reading a book and then trying to reflect on the whole thing at once, the statement either becomes very confusing or not very well supported. So this time, I decided to start looking for “themes” as I read the book or, more specifically, for passages that, basically summarize the entire plot line in a paragraph or two. I believe that  the quote above is such a passage.

In my last post, I talked about how the book seemed to be trying to convey a sense of inevitability, that things are the way they are “just because”. The quote that I found talks about the main character, Billy, crying over the poor conditions of the horses that he is using to get around. He is not particularly fond of these horses, in fact, he had seen the horses for the first time very recently, yet, it is the situation of these horses that brings tears to his eyes. He was captured as a prisoner of war, shuttled around Germany POW camps and treated like human cargo. He saw his fellow Americans die by the hand of the German firing squads and saw an entire city of civilians turned into a moonscape by allied bombers. But he did not cry about those things.

I think that Billy was struck  by the situation of these horses more than he was affected by the death of his fellow human beings for a simple reason. The war in Europe had just finished when this quote takes place. The end of a war is a time for celebration and a time of joy, especially if you are  POW belonging to the winning side. So Billy was happy then, and rightfully so. He probably felt that all was right with the world and that things were good. But the horses shocked him into a harsher reality, one where tragedy occurs to the most innocent of people(or in this case, animals).

I may or may not be mistaken, but I think that the author is trying really hard to convey the fact that (in simpler terms) “stuff happens”. I think that he believes that there will always be horrors amidst wonders, tragedy amidst celebration, but there are also wonders amidst horrors and a silver lining in every cloud to use a metaphor.

The character seems to come to the realization that, things generally aren’t worth getting upset about, because things like it will happen again, and there is no use grieving over hard times when life also has so many wonderful things to offer.

To use Mr. Jackson’s analogy of Aliens coming to Earth and finding nothing but a copy of Slaughterhouse five left, I believe that said aliens believe that humans wanted them to look past the bad things in life, and to focus on it’s pleasures.