Would you rather make your own decisions in life or have them already decided for you? That is what it is like to let your belief in fate guide your life. The main character Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut chooses to let fate decide his life, instead of him deciding his own. All throughout the novel he lets this unknown force choose being able to see old friends, allowing him to blame his responsibilities and making him accept his death even when it is avoidable in that situation. An essential theme in Slaughterhouse Five is that it is important to take control of your life as opposed to letting fate lead the way. Vonnegut's theme that it is important to take control of your life as opposed to letting fate lead the way is presented when characters in the book allow fate to dictate their meetings with friends. Vonnegut and his friend Bernard O'Hare became friends with a cab driver when they visited Dresden after WWII. After leaving Dresden, the cab driver, Gerard Müller sent O'Hare a card that said, "I hope that we'll meet again in the world of peace and …show more content…
freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will." (Vonnegut 2). The cab driver is saying that if they were to meet again, it would only be because fate had it set out for them. It would be an "accident." An accident means that they are not taking initiative, they are letting fate talk in their ears. If Vonnegut or Müller really wanted to see each other again, they could take the steps that involve them meeting again. Vonnegut enjoyed meeting Müller, and in life, you must create your own happiness. Vonnegut and Gerhard Müller shouldn't have let fate decide if they would meet again because they could have met again on their own. Vonnegut's theme is demonstrated again with an explanation of Billy's life in relation to the prayer hanging in his office. The prayer explained his technique on how to keep going in life and how he should accept things that cannot change. Vonnegut connects Billy's life to the prayer and says, "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." (60). Vonnegut says that Billy "could not change" his life because Billy lets himself be controlled by fate. The "future" is unpredictable and mostly controlled by the decisions Billy could make. For example, Billy can decide something as simple as what he eats for dinner instead of depending on fate to bring it to him somehow. The present time can be changed very easily and he denies his own control because he is always hanging onto fate. Even though the past cannot be changed, Billy has the power to make his life exactly how he wants it to be but Vonnegut says he cannot change a thing. The future and the present rests in Billy's hands but he continuously refuses the control of it because of his belief in fate standing in the way. Billy Pilgrim exemplifies Vonnegut’s theme again by denying police protection when he knows he will be shot and killed at his speech.
Billy pilgrim travels in time and sees that he gets shot at a speech he makes, and ends up dying. When the speech is over, police offer to stay with and protect Billy. He responds with, 'No, no' says Billy serenely. It is time for me to be dead for a little while" (142-143). “Serenely” means content and calm. Billy Pilgrim rejecting protection in a serenely way shows how careless he is about his life. He feels a comfort by fate and thinks fate is the only answer why he is so content about the situation. Also, it is never anyone’s “time to be dead” but Billy Pilgrim, again, lets fate rule and influence his life along with making him feel like it’s his time “to be dead for a little while”. Billy's unruffled ways shows how he allows destiny to guide his
life. A primary theme in Slaughterhouse-Five is that it is imperative to have authority over your own life instead of letting an unseen force guide you and your decisions. This theme is exemplified through the postcard Kurt received from Gerhard Müller, the framed prayer in Billy's office, and Billy's speech about death in Chicago. This is important because one must always take full responsibilities for one's actions instead of blaming them on an unknown force. We must live our life in the driver's seat as opposed to letting anything or anyone lead the way.
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.
There are many similarities between the war experiences of Kurt Vonnegut and the character of Billy Pilgrim in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Several similarities between them are shown in the letter from Kurt Vonnegut to his family dated May 29, 1945 (Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect 11-14).
“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
middle of paper ... ... It is clear that although Vonnegut's picture of the modern man is often bleak, he never totally abandons the glimmer of hope that accompanies the fact that life has its moments of grandeur. He encourages the modern reader to escape the question "why me" and urges us to embrace a philosophy that consistently reminds us that even in the midst of the most cruel (and the most celebrated) events, humanity retains all of its virtue and vice.
Billy has no control over his being in a time warp. In the midst of his life in New York he will suddenly find himself Tralfamadore; he has become "unstuck in time" ( 22). The Tralfamadorians eventually show Billy the important moments of his life, but they do not always show them in sequence. They do this so Billy can fully understand the true reasons for and the importance of the events.
Billy is also traumatized by the extreme loss in his life. Everywhere he looks, he experiences great loss. First his father dies in a hunting accident, then he gets in a plane crash and everyone aboard dies but him, and while he is in the hospital recuperating, his wife dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. There is so much death surrounding his life, that it is no wonder Billy has not tried to kill himself yet.
One can only imagine the intense emotional scarring that one would suffer after exiting an underground shelter with a dozen other men to find a city destroyed and its people dead, corpses laying all around. These feelings are what prompted Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse-Five as he did. The main character of this novel mirrors the author in many ways, but the striking similarity is their inability to deal with the events of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945. Section Two- Critical Commentaries Kurt Vonnegut's work is nothing new to critics, but Slaughterhouse-Five is considered to be his best work.
Billy Pilgrim relives the Dresden bombings and his captivity. His "unstuck in time" or time-traveling was just a mechanism to help him cope with post traumatic system disorder. His time-traveling always found him going back to Dresden.
The book, Slaughter House-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, is based on the main character named Billy Pilgrim who is a little "lost" in the head. Billy is always traveling to different parts of his life and rarely in the present state. Throughout the book Billy mainly travels back and forth to three big times in his life. In each different time period of Billy's life he is in a different place; his present state is in a town called Illium and his "travels" are to Dresden and Tralfamadore. When Billy is in Illium he is suppose to have a "normal" life; he is married, has two children, and works as an optometrist. Then Billy travels back to Dresden where he was stationed in the last years of WWII and witnessed the horrible bombing. When Billy travels to Tralfamadore he is in an "imaginary" state, everything that happens to him is more like a dream. Through Billy's travels in time he shows that he is striving to find meaning in the events that happened in his life that he is afraid to acknowledge. As Billy says himself, "All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist," (1) this just proves even further that fact that Billy cannot ever forget any event in his life.
Billy is used to showing that everything happens because of fate. As a prisoner, Billy has no control over his day to day life. While Billy is in Dresden, the city is bombed, because of luck, only Billy and a few others survive the bombing in a slaughterhouse. The people of Tralfamadore tell Billy that humans do not understand time because everything they do is in singular progression.
“Slaughterhouse-Five” is an anti-war novel. It describes a flesh-and-blood world. Main character is Billy Pilgrim, he is a time traveler in this book, his first name Billy is from the greatest novelist in the USA in 19 century’s novel “Billy Budd” ; and his last name is from “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan. Differently, the main character in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” ’s traveling has meaning and discovering, Billy Pilgrim’s traveling just has violence and escape. In the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut ’s main character, Billy Pilgrim is sane and his time travel is half in his mind half is real. He is looked so innocent and weakness, there is a sentence which is spoken by Billy Pilgrim “So it goes.” (2) This quotation shows that a poignant sense of helplessness.
Throughout the Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut displays the clash between free-will and destiny, and portrays the idea of time notion in order to substantiate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut crafts this through irony, symbolism and satire. And he successfully manages to prove that free-will is just a hoax that adopted by people that cannot percept time fully.
Billy is seeking forgiveness for his past, so that one day he can reach an oasis of serenity. Serenity is the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled with life. In order to reach serenity, Billy Pilgrim comes across a prayer. The prayer of serenity says, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” (Vonnegut 77).
Kurt Vonnegut has built a universe for Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five where Billy’s cruel, unforgiving reality is contrasted by a philosophical utopia where he has learned to operate without the pains of being human. Within this self-described ‘telegraphic’ and ‘schizophrenic’ novel, Vonnegut manages to swing the reader halfway across the galaxy to a planet inhabited by a plunger-like race called the Tralfamadorians, take them into the harrowing depths of a POW camp, and show you a man who is increasingly coming undone at the seams after having lived with the psychological terrors of the Dresden bombing. He accomplishes all of this while only leaving the reader with a slight case of jet lag and hopefully a new perspective on the American lifestyle. It does not change the way you think. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations.