In our everyday life, it seems as if we possess free will. We get up; we eat breakfast; go to school and or work; we come home; we eat dinner; and we go to bed--and repeat the cycle all over again the next day. It appears that we control our daily actions and exercise free will, but what if the very thought that our very thoughts that we were thinking was predetermined? What if it was already predestined that you were going to read this essay? Contrary to the popular theory of free will, that our actions from moment to moment are determined by our conscious thoughts, in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut challenges the general beliefs of free will through the use of Billy Pilgrim, who Vonnegut makes a Jesus-like figure. While Billy …show more content…
Pilgrim identifies with the seemingly contradictory views of Christianity and Tralfamadorianism, Vonnegut weaves in the two doctrines to emphasize Billy’s psychotic coping mechanism in reaction the atrocities of war; moreover, both views are identical in their rejection of free will, confirming that there is not meaning to human existence because our action are predicated upon time.
Although Pilgrim himself does not endorse the Christian religion, Billy abides by Christian values such as ethics such as morality, love, kindness, etc. There are several references that metaphorically overlap Pilgrim to Jesus the most obvious, being his last name: Pilgrim. In colonial America, “Pigram” refers to a group of Puritans who fled Europe and traveled to the New World from the English Separatist Church in search for religious freedom. Vonnegut intentionally chooses "Pilgrim" as the last name for the protagonist to highlight his divinity in comparison to the Pilgrims. Just like the pilgrims sought religious freedom, Billy strives to spread the Tralfamadorian sentiments to the world through his work in Optometry. Billy pines to "prescribe corrective lenses for Earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy believed because they could not see as well as his little green friends on Tralfamadore." Thus, just like Jesus wanted to transform the souls of sinful individuals to live in righteousness and virtue, Billy's life goal is to fix the earthling souls that were "lost and wretched" (pg. 25). The lesson that the Tralfamadorians teach Billy is that there is no way of …show more content…
changing fate or predetermined events. When Billy is abducted by the Tralfamadorians, they tell him that, "I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will" (pg. 86). The Tralfamadorians have just informed Billy the true nature of time; their creeds reveal their belief in a universe in which every moment is structured beyond the control of the constituents. Thus, if one rejects the notion of free will, and affirms predestination, then one is inherently affirming that all of the events in life are intended to happen because every event is planned, so since war is already planned, then war is intended and all attempts to stop war is like writing an anti-glacier book, something that you don't have the power to change. In light of this, just like Jesus wished to save people from their sinful behavior, Billy wishes to save earthling individuals from their tainted belief in free will and instead give them the grim truth: that earthlings that they have no power to change destiny. The Tralfamadorians grant Billy the ability to see time as nonlinear, which becomes the lens that Billy sees the world through. The Tralfamadorians say that "All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist" (pg. 27) and “whatever is always has been and always will be.” In wake of his powerless earthling abilities, the Tralfamadorians advice to Billy is ‘‘to concentrate on the happy moments of life, and to ignore the unhappy ones.’’ Although Billy adopts the Tralfamadorian ideas concerning events and time, Billy must face the stark reality that he has zero authority over his reality. He lives by the Biblical parable: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference" (pg. 60). Ironically, even though this is a Biblical prayer, a prayer being intended towards God, it is the Tralfamadorians who impart Billy with the courage to change. This way of thinking helps Billy cope with the horrific death and destruction of the war. This wisdom stops Billy from dying and or losing his identity in the midst of the ravenous bombing of Dresden. Pilgrim urges earthlings to accept the truths that everything is predestined and earthlings have no authority over their fate, that's when they can be content and understand that “everything was [is] beautiful and nothing hurt” (pg. 122). Since Vonnegut sees Jesus through the eyes of the Sci-Fi author Kilgore Trout, it degrades the infinite powers of Jesus Christ, rendering Jesus as just another powerless human solely subject to time. This disparagement is especially scenes in the Kilgore Trout story of Jesus and the Time Machine, a story about a time traveler who desired to discover "whether or not Jesus had really died on the cross, or whether he had been taken down while still alive, whether he had really gone on living." Regardless of Jesus's authority and power in the world, he was still subject to the cards that life dealt him. This story not only repeats the general Tralfamadorian view of time, it shows that not even the most divine individuals cannot escape their fate and that everyone is headed towards death in the end. Similarly, in another key Kilgore Trout novel, The Gospel from Outer Space, through the eyes of "a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian," chooses to investigate Christianity to find out "why Christians found it so easy to be cruel" (pg. 108). He arrives at the final conclusion that The Gospels, in fact, do not teach humans to be merciful and act with compassion. Rather, they teach: "Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected" (pg. 109). With the intention of changing The Gospels, so could misunderstand it, the visitor writes a new Gospel where Christ is a "nobody," with no influence. God informs the humans that he was adopting Jesus who they crucified, and from that moment on he would kill anyone who tortures “a bum who has no connections” (pg. 90). The Gospel from Outer Space further brings forth comparisons between Billy and Jesus. Billy is like the vulnerable soldier who is the nobody without any connections. This parallelism displays the powerlessness of Billy and all other individuals who have suffered; this powerlessness pushes Billy into passivity because he recognizes his inability to change what time has destined. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, uses Biblical references, Jesus as the primary reference, and the tenets of Tralfamadorians to emphasize Billy’s submissive, helpless condition.
Billy is placed in numerous egregious incidences during his time in World War II, observing the firebombing of Dresden and the deaths of his fellow soldiers in by German soldiers. An eye, one central characteristic of the Tralfamadorians, is symbolic of knowledge and sight. Just like Jesus had divine spiritual knowledge and sought to spread Christianity, Billy wished to spread the peculiar teachings Tralfamadorians. Billy’s belief in Tralfamadorians allows him to make sense of the tumultuous events in his life, so he wants other individuals to follow the Tralfamadorian way. Vonnegut also establishes that although may hold sacred spiritual knowledge although Billy possesses great spiritual knowledge, he still has human characteristic, so he is still subject to death--just like Jesus
was.
Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain’s assistant. A chaplain in the war’s job is to minister to military personnel, and families working for the military.. Billy Pilgrim’s past comes back for them to relive. As Billy is trying to “reinvent himself” he finds himself frolicking in his childhood at the Grand Canyon (Vonnegut 112). Billy was twelve years old when his mother and father took him on vacation to the Grand Canyon. Billy hated the Grand Canyon is was for certain that he would fall into the Bright Angel Point (Vonnegut 12). Approximately ten days after visiting the Grand Canyon, Billy visited Carlsbad Caverns. “The Caverns had been discovered by a cowboy who saw a huge cloud of bats come out of a hole in the ground” (Vonnegut 113). When
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five suggests that a man cannot change his fate. Any attempts to change the past or the future are meaningless. Therefore, there is nothing to search for, and the search for meaning is futile.
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
“Free will is the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion” (Dictionary.com). The novel Slaughterhouse five portrays the idea of not having free will. The award winning author, Kurt Vonnegut, tells
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.
All the tragic events in war that he had to deal with, such as seeing people get killed and wondering why he got picked to live have tainted his life . For Billy, traveling in the Tralfamadorian world, makes him relief of his guilt, such as mentioned of what Billy wants to be written on his tombstone, "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt"[p.122]. Billy’s trauma is so severe that he has to leave earth to heal. Tralfamadorian’s believe that time does not go forward and we cannot die. Billy believes that this can comfort those of the earth that are afraid of death. The other dimension that Billy had got his ideas of forth dimension and Trafamadorians are by the science fiction book of Kilgore Trout. One big evidence that came from Tout’s novel that demonstrates that Billy is lying is when he finds one of Trout’s books that he has never read before. "He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before-years ago, in the veteran’s hospital. It was about an Earthling ma and women who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon212". [p.201] This Kilgore Trout book is the foundation of his imaginary world. As I have mentioned earlier, Billy starts time traveling after
When Vonnegut created Billy Pilgrim, he made Billy subject to the experience of the war. In fact, Billy experiences it almost. exactly the same as Vonnegut himself had, including the experiences of being a POW and in the firebombing of Dresden. The. But in Billy's case, Vonnegut writes it with.
Vonneguts character Billy is showing frequent signs of mental illness throughout the book. Most of the chapters show his delusions in the repeated use of the extraterrestrials, the Tralfamadorians. Many scenes from his travels with the aliens can be seen in different parts of his life that Billy may not have realized he had seen and taken to insert into his own imaginary delusions. Vonnegut gives us many scenes to prove that the Tralfamadorians are just a construct of Billy’s broken mind through the use of Kilgore Trout's science fiction novels and other pieces of 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.
However, the books present response to war in a contrasting way. The incorporation of repetition, balance, and the idea of little control of one’s fate display parallelism between Billy Pilgrim and the soldiers of The Things They Carried while still distinguishing the existing psychological and internal contrast between them. When Billy is leading a parade in front of the Dresdeners prior to the bombing, Vonnegut
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
Baruch Spinoza once said “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He compared free-will with destiny and ended up that what we live and what we think are all results of our destiny; and the concept of the free-will as humanity know is just the awareness of the situation. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores this struggle between free-will and destiny, and illustrates the idea of time in order to demonstrate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut conveys this through irony, symbolism and satire.
In the novel, Kurt Vonnegut proposes the question of whether free will exist or not. The Tralfamadorians live with the idea of the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension contains occurring and reoccurring events, considering that they believe all moments have already passed. According to the Tralfamadorians, there is only free will on Earth, considering humans only think of time as a linear progression. Billy regresses back to events as a child, and remembers when his father let him sink to the bottom of the pool where he prefers to be, but he was rescued. As a young adult, Billy was drafted into the war against his free will. Even as a soldier in the war, Billy is not taken solemnly by the other soldiers. Billy comes to the conclusion that even if he trained hard, and became a good soldier he’d still die like the other soldiers in Dresden who are much better than him. Billy’s real world on earth seems to be taken into bits and pieces into the Tralfamadorian world where Billy thinks is error free. Although the serenity prayer is directed towards God, Billy directs it towards the Tralfamadorians instead. This prayer is significant to this theme, because Billy is trying to live up to the standards of the Tralfamadorians, which is nearly impossible and
Billy benefits greatly from this new cosmic outlook. He believes so much in the teachings of Tralfamadore that he even becomes a Jesus-like figure later in his life, eventually being publicly executed much like his Christian doppleganger. In his article, David L. Vanderwerken discusses the deterministic qualities of Tralfamadorianism, its argument against determinism, and the possible allure of it, “In short, Tralfamadorianism is an argument for determinism. Yet, this is a determinism without design, where chance rules. The universe will be destroyed accidentally by the Tralfamadorians, and wars on earth are inevitable..
The Thought-experiments in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance With Death