Introduction: All of the three texts explore religion and its practises, but each approach it from a different perspective. Whilst Owen and Brecht refer directly to the idea of God and Jesus, Vonnegut uses a far more ambiguous approach; the opinion of God in ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ has to be read allegorically, as Vonnegut’s mentions of Christianity are seldom stated. Religion does not have to be seen as only an ideology and references to God are not the necessity needed to create the theme of Religion – it appears through spirituality and communities which follow the same belief. The Thirty Years’ War of 1618 in ‘Mother Courage’, which emerged from a disagreement between Protestant and Catholic believers, is a distinct example of religious communities
‘Mother Courage’ is ‘A Chronicle of the Thirty Years’ War’ which is an ideological fight between a Protestant and a Catholic community, implying that the people are fighting against each other for their religion. During the first scene, the Army Recruiter mentions that religious propaganda is enforced ‘night and day’, yet personally adds that ‘once you’re washed clean of sin, you can sing any song you like’ . This sets the approach towards religion throughout most of the play. It is not questioned, but taken and accepted, whilst the ones fighting for religion are just waiting to be ‘washed clean of sin’. Although religion becomes the motivation of the war, it is not the true origin of its cause; Mother Courage finds no difficultly in switching sides during the war by claiming she is of a different religion, as ‘Protestant pants cover your ass same as any other’ . Similarly, the Chaplain himself finds no difficulty in pretending to be on the other side of the war – when Mother Courage changes the religious flag on the wagon, the Chaplain comments ‘Good Catholics now, root and branches’, accepting whatever religion they would claim to be. This can be related to dialectical materialism, as the characters have no sense of self in relation to religion – they change it according to comfortability. This represents the
It’s a miracle’ . In contrast, the General, in the same scene, praises religion, calling Eilif a ‘real Christian’ and calling the war a ‘war for God’ . The significance in comparing Mother Courage to the General is that one of them fights, the other only feeds on the war. The General, as a soldier, would be in need of motivation and gratification throughout the war. The General proclaims, following Eilif’s great stunt that ‘what’s done is done because God wants it done and you did it and I feel fantastic!’ – This amplifies the effect which appears from religious gratification combined with excellence within war. This causes more religious motivation, as The General makes Eilif assume that more war stunts need to be committed, as God ‘wants it’ and will praise it. In Slaughterhouse 5, Billy would be classified as one of the people finding motivation to ‘keep fighting’ through their religion. Billy’s experience with the Tralfamadorians can be classified as a religious experience and therefore his belief in the aliens enables him to keep going. Billy’s Tralfamadorian fantasy contains clear allusions to the Christianity and even his surname, ‘Pilgrim’ implies that he is on a pilgrimage, a religious journey.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of Billy Pilgrim 's capture by the Nazi Germans during the last years of World War II. Throughout the narrative, excerpts of Billy’s life are portrayed from his pre-war self to his post-war insanity. Billy is able to move both forward and backwards through his life in a random cycle of events. Living the dull life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a provocative woman on the planet Tralfamadore, and simultaneously an American prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. While I agree with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt that Slaughterhouse-Five effectively combines fact and fiction, I argue that the book is more centralized around coping.
The human mind is a part of the body which current science knows little about. Trigger mechanisms, and other factors within the brain are relatively unknown to current humanity. Therefore, in order to produce a diagnostic on why Billy Pilgrim became “unstuck” in time, the reader of Slaughterhouse Five must come to terms with situations concerning the experiences described in the novel. Billy Pilgrim starts out, chronologically, as a fairly basic infantryman in the United States Army during the last Nazi offensive of the war, also known as the Battle of the Bulge (Vonnegut, 32). That battle resulted in fierce fighting, and also in massacres (such as the one that occurred near Malmedy, France), and the reader may be sure that there were men who became mentally unsound due to the effects of what they experienced there. Pilgrim is taken in by a group of soldiers who have found themselves behind the Nazi lines and are required to travel, by foot, back to friendly lines (Vonnegut, 32).
Religion is introduced many times in Bloods. Religion played a major role for some veterans and impacted their daily lives as well. Luther Benton was one of those men; his Vietnam story in the book told a story of how Benton receives messages from God telling him to preach to people. Benton does answer God’s word until after he was back in the United States. Further into his story, he goes on to state “America hurt so many young men by putting them over in Vietnam to be introduced to prostitution, gamblin, drinkin, drugs… I think God meant for me to overcome these things.”(p.77-78) Luther Benton was a soldier who believed in God’s word and felt that the only one to thank for his survival, mentally and physically, is God. One other soldier in the book lost their faith in religion after the gruesome experiences they faced during the war but Wallace Terry seemed to have included more stories where religion and faith provided salvation for the Vietnam Veterans.
“Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.” Stated Abraham Lincoln. That quotes applies to Slaughterhouse-Five because even when you think you have conquered something and achieve the victory doesn’t mean that it will last long. Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim is non-heroic in the anti-war novel which makes the theme of the book Slaughterhouse-Five a man who is “unstuck” in time.
Though he was able to escape war unharmed, Billy seems to be mentally unstable. In fact, his nightmares in the German boxcar at the prisoners of war (POW) camp indicate that he is experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): “And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car. Nearly everybody, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away” (79). Billy’s PTSD is also previously hinted when he panics at the sound of sirens: “A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War III at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon” (57). The most prominent symptom of PTSD, however, is reliving disturbing past experiences which is done to an even more extreme extent with Billy as Slaughterhouse-Five’s chronology itself correlates with this symptom. Billy’s “abduction” and conformity to Tralfamadorian beliefs seem to be his method of managing his insecurity and PTSD. He uses the Tralfamadorian motto “so it goes” as a coping mechanism each time he relives a tragic event. As Billy struggles with the conflict of PTSD, the work’s chronological order is altered, he starts to believe
The primary theme of Inherit the Wind is clearly the broad conflict of fundamentalism on the side of religion as well as freedom of thought. The trial a...
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five the main character Billy Pilgrim experiences few emotions during his time in World War II. His responses to people and events lack intensity or passion. Throughout the novel Billy describes his time travel to different moments in his life, including his experience with the creatures of Tralfamadore and the bombing of Dresden. He wishes to die during most of the novel and is unable to connect with almost anyone on Earth. The fictional planet Tralfamadore appears to be Billy’s only way of escaping the horrors of war, and acts as coping mechanism. Billy seems to be a soldier with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as he struggles to express feelings and live in his reality. At the beginning of the novel the narrator proposes his reason for writing the book is to explain what happened in the Dresden fire bombing, yet he focuses on Billy’s psyche more than the bombing itself. PTSD prevents Billy from living a healthy life, which shows readers that the war does not stop after the fighting is over and the aftermath is ongoing. Billy Pilgrim’s story portrays the bombing and war in a negative light to readers, as Vonnegut shows the damaging effects of war on an individual, such as misperception of time, disconnect from peers, and inability to feel strong emotions, to overall create a stronger message.
After a dramatic event happens in someone’s life such as war, some people cannot function the same way as they did previously. To make a reference to the novel, "Slaughterhouse five" written by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim’s character experiences war during World War II. Some drastic changes happened in his way of dealing with the fact of surviving a war. He claims to travel in time and to meet Aliens, called the "Tralfamadorian’s". This essay will discuss Billy believing that he is meeting Aliens and traveling in time, but in fact he only has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after surviving the war.
Thomas C. Foster explains in Chapter 6 that religion is always tied into books and stories. No matter how unrelated religion may seem it’s always in there, just not in the way you expect it to be. The author may not stand before you and part the Red Sea however Foster says “Many modern and postmodern texts are essentially ironic, in which the allusions to biblical sources are used not to heighten continuities between the religious tradition and the contemporary moment but to illustrate a disparity or disruption.” Page 47 In Reservation Blues it shows religious traditions and disruption through religion. While boarding a plane for the first time to meet some record producers, Victor is extremely frightened. Victor has a little bit of an aviophobia
In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, he talks about World War II and the bombing of Dresden. He writes about this historical event through the character Billy Pilgrim, Billy is drafted into the army at age twenty-one during World War II. He is captured and sent to Luxembourg and then later Dresden as a prisoner. Throughout the novel, Vonnegut constantly ridiculous Billy. He describes Billy as a character that has no individualism and no choice in anything that happens in his life.
There is a fine line between sanity and insanity, a line that can be crossed or purposefully avoided. The books The Things They Carried and Slaughterhouse-Five both explore the space around this line as their characters confront war. While O’Brien and Vonnegut both use repetition to emphasize acceptance of fate, their characters’ psychological and internal responses to war differ significantly. In The Things They Carried, the narrator and Norman Bowker carry guilt as evidence of sanity. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim and the innkeepers carry on with life in order to perpetuate sanity. Both authors develop a distinct theme of responding in the face of the insanity of war.
One of the most prevalent themes in Vonnegut’s works is religion. In the early pages of Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut submits his contention that "a useful religion can be founded on lies (Vonnegut, Cats Cradle 16)," meaning that, fundamentally, religion is about people, not about faith or God. Reminiscent of Karl Marx’s description of religion as the "opiate of the masses," he describes all religions as mere collections of "harmless untruths" that help people cope with their lives. The Book of Bokonon in Cat's Cradle represents this portrait of religion at both its dreariest and its most uplifting, Bokononism is contradictory, paradoxical, and founded on lies; its followers are aware of this...
Billy Pilgrim is also not like Pilgrim who is the main character in the “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, although they have same last name. His experience is very horrible in the war, there are just have violence and cruel, like the soldier who is in the “Three musketeers”. Imaginary, a man who just naive and have a great lucky, how can he keep his life in the war, just lucky? It is funny. Thus, though the whole novel “Slaughter-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character, Billy Pilgrim is a contradictory person who has the naive and sane attitude together, in almost time he looks like a child, but his wise can “see” at his speaking and action, likes his speaking “So it goes.” (2) Not only is the indifference to the lives, or the hatred and
The growth of religious ideas is environed with such intrinsic difficulties that it may never receive a perfectly satisfactory exposition. Religion deals so largely with the imaginative and emotional nature, and consequently with such an certain elements of knowledge, the all primitive religions are grotesque to some extent unintelligible. (1877:5)
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five the setting jumps between Germany, New York and Tralfamadore. The entire book goes over almost all of Billy’s life from when he was a young adult in World War II, to when he gets back and is an old man. When Billy is in the war he sees horrific things, which later leads him to going to Tralfamadore. Billy fights in the Battle of the Bulge and sees some horrific things like seeing Dresden go from a beautiful city to a place with “no food or water, and that the survivors, if they were going to continue to survive, were going to have to climb over after curve on the face of the moon” (229). Tralfamadore is a place Billy believes he goes. It is an alien planet which Tralfamadorians live