The Theme Of Death In Slaughterhouse-Five And The Things They Carried

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In Slaughterhouse-five and The Things They Carried, death is a significant occurrence. Both books hold the belief that death is just a brief moment in time, that you will be alive far more often than you ever will be dead. When it comes to this idea of death, Billy Pilgrim embraces the idea of it. In The Things They Carried however, Tim cannot stand the idea of it and tries to wipe it completely from his mind. Billy’s acceptance of death portrays him to be much happier and at peace, while Tim’s rejection of it causes him to fall into a state of sadness and stress.
Tim has many reasons why he is not too fond of the idea of death, one of those reasons is when the other soldiers in his unit shake hands with a dead man. Tim hated the “act of greeting the dead.” He found it disrespectful and he quickly became nauseous. To the soldiers who were in Vietnam longer than Tim, It was “like a funeral without the sadness.” Despite Tim’s negative reaction, the other soldiers never meant any harm by it, the other soldiers wanted to show Tim that death wasn’t all that bad when you looked at in a different light. High fiving and greeting a deceased person was a way of coping with death for them and to celebrate the loss of someone they barely knew. …show more content…

Tim was only nine years old when he lost Linda, but he knew what love was. When Linda died of cancer it negatively affected Tim all the way up into his forties. Tim wanted desperately to “save Linda’s life. Not her body ---- her life.” To cope with the loss of Linda, Tim would dream about her and would make up dialogue between the two of them. In Tim’s dreams, Linda would explain to Tim that death simply “doesn’t matter.” To Linda, death is “like a book up on a library shelf, that hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time.” The memory never goes away, it is always

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