Free Will In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Billy Pilgrim develops his own Tralfamadorian belief to explain all the deaths of the innocent people during the bombing of Dresden. During his daughters wedding a long time after the war Billy is abducted by aliens and taken to their plant of Tralfamadore. While there Billy learns of the alien’s philosophy of time and death. Billy realizes that this philosophy echoes his own feelings. To the Tralfamadorians time is constant not a linear progression of events, they explain, “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist” (Vonnegut 34). He turns to this belief to convince himself that these deaths were supposed to happen and there is nothing he or anyone could have done to stop them, what was going to occur had

Vonnegut has the opinion that free will is “rarely used in any of his novels” (Westerblom 17). Vonnegut believes that the characters in his novel “have suffered at the hands of fate for so long that they often give up on exerting their free will and surrender to their fate” (17). Billy is the best example of this in his novel. Westerblom says “his experiences from the war together with his sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Billy surrenders control of his free will and embraces his fate” (17). Schroder states her belief in an article that Vonnegut views quietism and “fatalism” as a coping mechanism for a person to “slip blissfully and thoughtlessly into the mindless routine of daily existence thus dismissing free will” (qtd. in

In Slaughterhouse-five Vonnegut’s uses a satirical writing style to portray his anti-war belief, showing the effect war can have on people. Roland Weary and Edgar Darby two of Billy Pilgrim’s friends are dead, this leaves him cynical and dead inside. Vonnegut did not want to write a novel that glorified war and as he promised “there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne” (15). Slaughterhouse-five also conveys the idea of free will and predestination through the Characters. Billy is used as an example of the exact opposite of Vonnegut’s personal views. Billy’s Tralfamadorian belief that everything is pre-determined from his birth and there is no point in attempting to change anything since everything is meaningless. Vonnegut uses the sad supposedly meaningless life of Billy to demonstrate the dangers of quietism. He wants to show readers that they should make an effort to change, in turn changing their world and their future. Although Vonnegut’s tone is pessimistic, he successfully illustrates a sense of optimism and the belief in people to successfully change the world in which they live and that life is not meaningless no matter what traumas a person has