The Hitchhiking Game

"The Hitchhiking Game" written by Milan Kundera is a story about two lovers on their first vacation together. On the road to their destination, the young man stops at the girl's request. She needs to go use the restroom, but she feels more comfortable not explicitly telling him her need. As she finishes up using the restroom, she starts walking down the road, so the young man stops to pick her up a couple hundred feet towards their destination. He pretends to pick her up as a hitchhiker, and at first she doesn't enjoy the game at all. But, she continues with the game, and he does too. After a while the two choose to take a road that would not end up taking them to their destination at all, and here the game is taken to a different level. The two become engrossed in the game: the girl feels like she can stop at any minute (although she enjoys the feeling of being sexually comfortable with her new, sensual self), but the boy becomes transformed by the game and cannot snap out of its effect. Ultimately, the two continue with the game, which takes them to a bedroom above a restaurant, where the two engage in sexual intercourse, which is not filled with any remote slightness of love. This act is where the girl crosses her boundary, and the young man did not change one bit. They finish their act of sexual intercourse, and they lay on the bed beside one another, except not touching. The girl is heartbroken, having given up the game after it got too serious, and the boy is indifferent, still caught up in the mysticism and magic of the game. The story ends with the sentence, "There were still thirteen days left on their vacation," which makes the reader confused as to the content of their continued relationship. Kundera leaves the conclusion of the story up to the reader for his/her own decision.

Time Travel in Slaughterhouse 5

I thought our discussion the other day on time travel was very interesting, but I still think most of it is speculation and the use of random examples to explain a theory. But who knows, in an alternate universe, I might be wrong. I do find this topic quite stimulating, however, and I talked more about it with Chris later that day at lunch. He helped me understand it a little better as time travel pertains to the fourth dimmension and the speed of light. I think Kurt Vonnegut explored the early theories of time travel in his book Slaughterhouse Five, but I think he probably stumbled upon some of the things that we discovered in class by chance.