What would you do for True Love?

I'm writing this really quickly before our cooking meeting (sorry I'm so late).

I love the Vonnegut stories and I agree with Amrita, Vonnegut is a lot better in Welcome to the Monkey House. My favorite of the stories we have read are Welcome to the Monkey House and EPICAC. EPICAC was a very imaginative story and had a magical quality to it, kind of like a children's story where an object comes to life at night. I was impressed with the self-sacrifice of EPICAC, who is a very interesting character despite being a machine. I think it is notable that he was being developed for war and he destroyed himself for love. He was in many ways superior to humans emotionally, probably as a result of his stoic machine nature. He understood sacrificial love almost as soon as he was given a definition of love, a feat that most humans could never claim. His understanding is especially obvious next to the narrator's, who betrays him and misleads his wife. I guess the narrator never told Pat about what EPICAC did.

I thought Welcome to the Monkey House was interesting because of the way it glorified rape. When Billy explains his motives to Nancy at the end, he explains that he only did this to her in order to bring her to the light, to let her hate him and look for another man that she could actually love. Does the end result of Nancy being in love justify the means of rape? Love is obviously necessary to a person's life, but is physical love worth demeaning him or her? I think Billy could have spent a little more time with Nancy and made the near gang rape unnecessary; he could have used other means. I think this debate is interesting in our contemporary society, which is obsessed with finding true love and especially with everyones' right to and desire for a fastidious sex life.