Chapter Two "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." ... His father died in a hunting accident before Billy left for Europe. ... His father collects torture devices. ... He goes back to the red light of pre-birth and then forward again to a day in his childhood with his father at the YMCA. His father tries to teach him how to swim by the sink-or-swim method. ...
The twentieth century really begins before the end of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887 was felt by many to represent the end of an era. An end-of-century stoicism, and a growing pessimism among writers and intellectuals, may be traced to several sources, not least the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species which put the existence of God into radical question. Across the whole population, and in the face of rapid economic and social changes, radical doubts about the stability of the existing order were expressed. By the end of the nine...
