Monkey House, By Birdie Mr. Schelle

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Birdie Mr. Schelle Short Story Essay 17 May 2024 When you change your mentality it is not always pretty To change society, you must first change yourself for change to happen outside it needs to happen within first. The most important part of change is knowing that change needs to happen rather than change. In Kurt Vonnegut's short story Welcome to the Monkey House, the society it takes place in is overpopulated and over-controlled. The government takes a mindset of being pure and deriving from pleasure. The two tactics the world government has for the population are ethical suicide with a hostess who is a forever virgin and will try to convince you to follow through with suicide “The art of every hostess, was to see that volunteers didn't …show more content…

Ironically, it doesn't stop the ability to have kids; that's the ethical part of “Science and morals go hand in hand”(31). People who do not take these pills are labeled and criminalized as nothing heads. One of these heads is Billy the poet who is the definition of a rebel; he strives for societal change. He believes the only way to change society is to change it. So he tries to change hostesses, one of which is Nancy McLuhan, whom Billy abducts. then deflowers her after the ethical birth control pills are off, which shows. Sometimes when people want change so badly, they go crazy trying to force it on others. One of Billy's most important motivations to change society is that the world government controls everything, “practically everything is the government” (34). He wants to change that, he knows that it is easy to control someone when they do not know they are being controlled. However, he doesn't know whether something is right or wrong, and that it depends on what side you look at it from. The majority of society thinks that the heads are wrong and harming society, so they are criminalized and wrong by the …show more content…

Billy thinks he can change society by forcing people to see his side. Because Billy is a nothing head and a rebel he converts people to join his gang; he runs from the police doesn't take his pills and forcefully deflowers hostesses; he's smart and cunning and a trickster but most importantly has feelings, not just physical feelings from not taking ethical birth control but mental feelings, he regrets when he does “he was terribly depressed and he said to Nancy ‘believe me if there’d been any other way’”(47) but at the same time knows he has to do it He's conflicted with this moral dilemma of letting them stay in their society, where they can't feel, or forcing them to see what it is like on the other side, where they can feel. Billy desperately wants society to change from dealing with overpopulation in an ethical way that doesn't work, to dealing with overpopulation in a way that is not ethical but works. The short story The Monkey House deals with a very real ethical dilemma of birth control and abortion and the ethical side of a woman's choice for her

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