The Organ of Meaning

I wanted to document this here since my wife is so smart. A few years ago I convinced her that she needed to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, tonight it all came back to her while we were watching Lost.

As the first couple of scenes played out… just before Desmond was loading the boxes on the back of the military truck, she says that it’s something like SL5 and that the character in the book Billy Pilgrim had also become “unstuck in time.” Immediately after that Lost’s writers threw us a bone… the other guy loading boxes on the truck is named Billy.

Later Daniel even says that Desmond has become “unstuck in time” which is the exact phrase that Vonnegut uses in reference to Billy Pilgrim. In SL5 it indicates that Billy’s “unstuckness” is related to a plane crash and to his encounter with (not exactly) time-traveling aliens.