The philosophy in Slaughterhouse-Five
Structure:
1. Introduction
→ Central question
2. Consideration
→ Analysis aspects
3. Conclusion
Introduction
In his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969,
describes Kurt Vonnegut the war experience and life of Billy
Pilgrim who is sent to World War Two as a soldier.
Vonnegut’s character is “unstuck in time”, could rather be described as an
anti-hero and gets from time to time in contact with aliens called
Tralfamadorians.
As unusual as the contents of the novel is Vonnegut’s philosophy which can be
discovered in the book.
Our central question
With the aid of his plot the author makes a comment on different
philosophical topics like war, time, life and death, free will, money, success
and truth.
→ How are these aspects described in the book and can we in general agree
with the author?
A consideration
The war
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re
writing anti-war books? “
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?” (p.8 , 11-14)
The author’s intention is to state that there will always be wars and you
can’t prevent them.
Furthermore wars are compared to a natural phenomenon which people
can’t hide from.
This indicates a very pessimistic side of view from the author because
according to him people are helpless in case of a war.
These issues lead us to the next main point of philosophical aspects in
Vonnegut’s book.
Free Will
“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings
or explanations.
It simply is.
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said
before, bugs in amber”.
“You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will”.
(…)
“Only on earth is there any talk of free will”. (p89/90, 20-5)
While Billy is kidnapped by the aliens Tralfamadorians, he gets
introduced into their philosophy and thoughts about life.
One point of their perception is that they do not believe in free will at all.
According to them there exists some kind of predestination and what
happens in time to everyone would not be changeable.
Again, Vonnegut uses his metaphorical comparisons to illustrate a point
of view.
In this case he uses the scene of a bug being trapped in amber, not able
to escape again.
This can be compared to the Tralfamadorian view on destination of life:
Humans are trapped in their own life, they are not able to change
aspects and they can’t get away from their destination.
Everything will take its way and people can’t control it.
Additionally this aspect carries forward to the function of time in the
novel.
If people can’t control their own life they seem not to have the ability to
change what happens in time.
Time
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.
“Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the
present and the future”. (p. 64, 16-25)
Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time. This means he has no influence which
time of his life, he will experience in the next moment.
Without any chronological order, Billy lives through parts of his
childhood, his life as a husband, his war experience and at last at his
imprisonment on Tralfamadore.
It’s not only, that he is “unstuck in time”, he also goes through his
experiences repeatedly.
He already knows what happens, when he travels in time again but still
can’t change the events.
“If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we
will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I
am not overjoyed. Still—if I am going to spend eternity visiting this
moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.”
( Chapter 10 )
In conclusion Billy’s life seems to have a connection with the
Tralfamadorian philosophy.
He lives his life as Tralfamadorians see the time like “(..) a stretch of the
Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change.” ( p.29/19 -20)
As the Tralfamadorians say all actions which happen are predestinated.
Everything which happens in Billy Pilgrims’s future is what happened in
his past and what he can experience in the present, because of time
travel.
Money and success
Billy Pilgrim is not the typical hero of a novel.
He is described as a „funny-looking“ person who is “shaped like a bottle of CocaCola“(page 27/16-18).
In the war, he is saved by two scouts and Roland Weary. They make him go on,
while he in fact wishes to die all the time. Later in the story, it is them, who will
not survive.
Billy never shows many signs of intelligence or courage, he simply gets slided into
events and survives them.
When he collapses in the war prisoners camp, he is again helped by people who
are much stronger than him.
The soldier Edgar Derby volunteers to have a watch on Billy in this time.
Derby himself is much braver than Billy, athletic, educated and has more life
experience.
Despite that, it is mentioned a few times in the novel, that Derby will die at the
end in Dresden.
An interesting point is, that Derby only once showed a weakness in the novel, he
then is “arrested for plundering“ (page 214/25-27), because he steals a teapot and
is tried and shot.
So the point is, why did exactly Billy survive all the cruel events of war, while
houndred thousands of soldiers just got killed, no matter how rich or educated or
skillfull they have been ?
There seems to be predestination.
Vonnegut illustrates this point with the comparison of the brave man Derby who
dies and the silly and easy-minded Billy who survives, although he never did
anything heroic.
So Billy who never showed much courage in life, survives the war and marries
Barbara, the daughter of an owner of an Optometry School and becomes rich.
People would call him successful, although “he knew he was going crazy when he
heard himself proposing marriage to her (Valencia)“(page 111/ 21-22).
His son Robert who is a difficult teenager, but joins the military, “straightens out“
and fights in Vietnam.
The question is, how can a father after experiencing all the violence and cruelty,
like the idea of his son being a killer and fighting in war?
“Billy was not moved to protest the bombing of North Vietnam, did not shudder
about the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do“. (page 64/6-8)
Vonnegut illustrates this aspect of fathers fighting in World War Two and their
sons fighting in Vietnam.
At last there is also the dubiousness of the bombing of Dresden.
Just like dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the government
presented it as a necessary action and a success which shortened the war and lead
into peace.
Vonnegut describes with his novel the aspects of the bombing which are often not
mentioned when people talk about the successes in wars.
He questions the definition of success at all.
Death
The main idea Vonnegut wants to present about death in his novel is, that it cannot be
prevented.
Death is a part of life.
When Billy is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians, he kind of gets into philosophic
discussions with them and they explain to him how they experience time.
Billy later explains their view at a public radio station :
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he
only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to
cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will
exist.
The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a
stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.(...) It is just an illusion we have here on
Earth that one moment follows another one(...). (page 30-31/23-3)
“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad
condition in that particular moment, but the same person is just fine in plenty of other
moments“. (page 31/5-8)
Because Billy accepts the Tralfamadorian philosophy and begins to see the things in the
same way, he cannot feel sad about death, because it is only one part of life beneath so
many others.
All the time in the novel, when people die, the phrase “So it goes“ appears.
So the reader would normally think in the beginning of the novel such phrases as
“(...) his wife died accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes“ would
be morbid, but they only accord with the philosophy of Vonnegut's novel.
For instance Billy's wife Valencia is only dead in this moment, but as a traveller in
time, he can always experience those moments again, when she is still alive.
So being unstuck in time Billy always experiences death, also his own and again
the parts of life when those people are still living.
Tralfamadorian Philosophy
As Billy cannot change any actions in his life and there are so many of them which
he would rather like not to have lived through, the Tralfamadorians give him the
advice to only look at the good things in life, when Billy is asking why they live on
a peaceful planet :
“But you do have a peaceful planet here“.
“Today we do. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you´ve ever seen or
read about. There isn´t anything we can do about them, so we simply don't look at
them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments(...)“ (page
121/8-12).
“That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough : Ignore
the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones“(page 121/15-17).
Conclusion
The main idea which is presented by Vonneguts aspects of philosophy is that
there exists some kind of predestination.
Billy travels through time again and again, but is never able to change the
happenings.
His life is simply as it is – predestinated.
Wars and other cruelties on earth are seen in the same way – They just happen
and you cannot change anything with that.
This attidude of predestination is a very pessimistic one or even a resigned.
People like Vonnegut who witnessed many bad things in life and who saw the
violence people are able to make use of, often do not believe anymore into
changing the world in a better one.
There are and will always be awful things to witness and experience, therefore the
Tralfamadorians give Billy the advice to only look at the positive sides of life.
But on the other hand, if there is no free will and only predestination, who will
prevent wars in the world ? Who can solve problems ?
If you never believe in a better world, how could there ever be any progress or
improvements ?
If you always ignore the negative sides of life, do you not become ignorant ?
In a human society which wastes and destroys the world, we cannot only look at
the good things in life, we have to become active and try to find solutions for all
the problems.
Vonnegut did a good job in showing the cruel characteristics of human beings, as
people often do not think about all the misery in the world.
But in our opinion it is wrong to accept our life as predetermined, because it
simply is not. It is our resoponsibility to care about our society, environment and
the future of our children. We shall participate to not doing the same mistakes
that were made in the past.