Comparing Death In Slaughterhouse-Five And The Things They Carried

In Slaughterhouse-five and The Things They Carried, death was a significant occurrence. Both books held the belief that death is just a brief moment in time, and people will be alive far more often than they will be dead. When it comes to the concept of death, Billy Pilgrim embraced the idea of it. In The Things They Carried however, Tim could not stand the idea of death and tried to wipe it from his mind completely. Billy’s
acceptance of death portrayed him as much happier and at peace with himself, while
Tim’s rejection of it caused him sadness and stress.
Tim had many reasons for why he was not too fond of death, one instance being when the other soldiers in his unit high fived, chatted to, and shook hands with a dead man. Tim hated the

“act of greeting the dead.” He (like most people) found it disrespectful and he quickly became nauseous, but to the soldiers who were in Vietnam longer than Tim, and saw more than Tim did yet, They viewed It as “a funeral without the sadness.” The other soldiers hadn’t meant any harm by it, High fiving and greeting a deceased person was a way of coping with death for them and a way of celebrating the loss of someone they barely knew. They wanted to show Tim that death wasn’t all that bad when it was looked at in a different light.
Tim’s other main reason for hating the idea of death was the loss of his love Linda.

Tim was only nine years old when he lost Linda, but he knew what love was. When Linda died of cancer, it negatively affected Tim into his forties because he wanted desperately to “save Linda’s life. Not her body ---- her life.” To cope with the loss of Linda, Tim would dream of her. In Tim’s dreams, Linda would explain to Tim that death simply “doesn’t matter.” Linda was so vivid in Tim’s dreams and memories, that it didn’t matter at all if she was alive or not. Her memory was still there, it never left Tim. To explain this philosophy better to Tim, Linda described death as “a book up on a library shelf, that hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time.” Tim already read through Linda’s short life. When he was done, he put her up on a shelf and there she remains, not inexistent, not gone, just sitting there. Everything Tim read never erased itself from his mind when he reached those final pages, It just was over to be relayed back to

later.
Unlike Tim’s rejection of death, Billy quickly accepted it and dreamed about when he would die.

Billy learned his philosophy of death from the Tralfamadorians, the aliens who abducted him. They believed that time was virtually nonexistent, so when you die, they were only deceased at that moment and alive all the others. Billy has traveled in time all throughout his life, so he has seen a lot of death; The deaths of many American and Russian soldiers in the train and slaughterhouse, the death of his wife; dozens of others in a plane crash, and his own death. Everything that Billy saw was death, so he quickly became used to it to the point where it didn’t matter much to him. He awaited his death; at his speech he would say “hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye.” to tell his audience and “adoring fans” that he would never truly leave, that when he would be shot on the scene they should just let it occur, because they would always remember him, he would never truly leave. Whenever Billy saw death or spoke of it, he would just say “so it goes.” Billy used this phrase to help cope with the loss of someone and move on, unlike Tim who spent countless hours dreaming and crying over someone’s death. Billy also knew when a death would occur so it never came as a shock to him. Overall Billy became numb to all the death he saw each and everyday that he had no other choice but to accept it, and he was happier that

way.
The idea of death in The Things They Carried and Slaughterhouse-five showed that many people are a lot like Tim. They spend so much time mourning over the loss of someone that they have no time to enjoy their memory. Billy never mourned the death of anyone, not even himself, because unlike Tim, Billy knew that a memory was more important than the body that contained it. Even though these two novels are separate and written by different authors, they both have similar views on death. In the end, people should be more like Billy and instead of mourning losses they just need to say “so it goes” and move on.