Conflict In Slaughterhouse Five

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Recommended: A long reflection about Adam and Eve

In the anti-war novel Slaughterhouse five, we follow Billy Pilgrim in his travel through time. Slaughterhouse five is narrated in the style of the Christian Bible where we have the creation, the man’s fall, the crucifixion and the resurrection. Kurt Vonnegut addresses the issues of war and its destructiveness through the use biblical stories such as Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and the pillar of salt in order to find meaning to his and Billy Pilgrim’s life. One of the first biblical stories used by Vonnegut is the story of Lot’s wife, which is mentioned in the Genesis and the New Testament. She is forced to leave the town of Sodom with her family after being threatened by the townspeople. Lot’s wife ignores the Angel’s demands to leave …show more content…

In chapter three, a German corporal wearing a pair of golden cavalry boots claims that “if you look in there deeply enough, you’ll see Adam and Eve”. As Billy Pilgrim is waiting he “stared into the patina of the corporal’s boots, saw Adam and Eve in the golden depths, they were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently” (p.67-68). By creating this moment, Vonnegut shows the reader that even if the normal linear time frame of a novel should push the characters to evolve, Billy’s nonlinear time frame that he seems to have, is looking backwards to Adam and Eve hence letting the reader understand his eagerness in pursuing innocence and the idea of an orderly world where people want “to behave decently”. It represents his deepest wish at this point in time, as well as comprehending that men like Billy Pilgrim and Corporal Campbell are not at peace in their mind because they are always after knowledge and perpetually try to learn more. This relates once again to Adam and Eve that have lost peace and the Garden of Eden because of the similar thirst of knowledge. We can start to understand that his ‘jumps in time’ are Billy’s way to escape a hard and cold reality that he is not capable of facing mentally or physically at such young …show more content…

Billy Pilgrim escapes to his own Eden, Tralfamadore in order to overcome the problems he is facing. Vonnegut shows that Billy uses religion as a way to protect himself from society and the dangers science created along with the fatalist society he lives in. By creating new religions and using biblical stories, based on societal values to find meaning in his life. Vonnegut tries to share his fear of mankind destruction by using myths for the reader to grasp that if people keep following the current set of rules established by society like Billy, it will bring them to their downfall, which is shown by his state of mind. We can observe that he uses biblical stories and religion in order to guide people as well as making a satire of the present world, which seems to be mainly based on science. Furthermore, Vonnegut chooses to make Billy appear as he did, in order for the reader to sympathize with him and really understand the impact war had on him, both during where we can see that he escapes through his ‘time traveling’ and after when he is physically hurt and also treated very poorly by his family who think he has a mental

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