The Sirens of Titan: Kurt Vonnegut

This was a fascinating novel in that EVERYTHING is important. The story wraps every occurrence and every object up in a way that the reader isn't left wondering "why" or "what if". Malachi Constant is the richest man in the United States and seems to also be the luckiest man on Earth. He is invited to materialization where a man, Winston Niles Rumfoord, living on Mars telecommunicates? with his wife, Beatrice. Winston tells Malachi that he will move to titan and have a child with his wife. After leaving the house both Malachi and Beatrice are ruined financially. Malachi joins the Martian army and Beatrice is on the same ship as Malachi on the journey to Mars. Malachi rapes Beatrice and they have a child, Chrono. Both Malachi and Beatrice have their memories erased and they forget about each other. Malachi becomes known as UNK and ends up strangling his best friend because he was commanded to and couldn't remember his friend stony after having his memory erased the 7th time. Stony tells him where to find a letter and UNK finds a letter he has written himself about remembering he has a family and best friend. Chrono ends up finding a piece of metal that becomes his lucky talisman. The family joins back up together and with the help of Rumfoord they travel back to earth where Rumfoord has started his new religion "Church of God the Utterly Indifferent". He then makes fun of both Beatrice and Malachi in front of his followers and they head to Tralfamadore where Beatrice lives in a palace like the Taj Mahal and Chrono lives with the bird population. Malachi lives in the spaceship Salo owned and was waiting for the replacement part for, which is actually Chrono's lucky talisman. Beatrice dies and Salo, with his fixed spaceship, drops Malachi off on earth (where he will die on a park bench waiting for a bus) before taking his message on to distant gallery (the message was a single dot that meant "greetings" which he spent thousands of earth years trying to deliver). Salo hypnotizes Malachi before he dies so he believes Stony came back for him in a spaceship. The story revolved around the idea of free will, or the lack of free will and that all of the earth’s history centered on the manipulation of the Tralfamadorians so we would become civilized enough to make a replacement part for the spaceship delivering the important message of “greetings”