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Essays on death in literature
Essays on death in literature
Life and death in literature
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In Slaughterhouse-five and The Things They Carried, death was a significant occurrence. Both books held the belief that death is just a brief moment in time, and people will be alive far more often than they will be dead. When it comes to the concept of death, Billy Pilgrim embraced the idea of it. In The Things They Carried however, Tim could not stand the idea of death and tried to wipe it from his mind completely. Billy’s acceptance of death portrayed him as much happier and at peace with himself, while Tim’s rejection of it caused him sadness and stress. Tim had many reasons for why he was not too fond of death, one instance being when the other soldiers in his unit high fived, chatted to, and shook hands with a dead man. Tim hated the …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 into his forties because he wanted desperately to “save Linda’s life. Not her body ---- her life.” To cope with the loss of Linda, Tim would dream of her. In Tim’s dreams, Linda would explain to Tim that death simply “doesn’t matter.” Linda was so vivid in Tim’s dreams and memories, that it didn’t matter at all if she was alive or not. Her memory was still there, it never left Tim. To explain this philosophy better to Tim, Linda described death as “a book up on a library shelf, that hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time.” Tim already read through Linda’s short life. When he was done, he put her up on a shelf and there she remains, not inexistent, not gone, just sitting there. Everything Tim read never erased itself from his mind when he reached those final pages, It just was over to be relayed back to …show more content…
Billy learned his philosophy of death from the Tralfamadorians, the aliens who abducted him. They believed that time was virtually nonexistent, so when you die, they were only deceased at that moment and alive all the others. Billy has traveled in time all throughout his life, so he has seen a lot of death; The deaths of many American and Russian soldiers in the train and slaughterhouse, the death of his wife; dozens of others in a plane crash, and his own death. Everything that Billy saw was death, so he quickly became used to it to the point where it didn’t matter much to him. He awaited his death; at his speech he would say “hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye.” to tell his audience and “adoring fans” that he would never truly leave, that when he would be shot on the scene they should just let it occur, because they would always remember him, he would never truly leave. Whenever Billy saw death or spoke of it, he would just say “so it goes.” Billy used this phrase to help cope with the loss of someone and move on, unlike Tim who spent countless hours dreaming and crying over someone’s death. Billy also knew when a death would occur so it never came as a shock to him. Overall Billy became numb to all the death he saw each and everyday that he had no other choice but to accept it, and he was happier that
...t or the future. With this information, Billy begins to learn about the future. “I, Billy Pilgrim will die, have died, and will always die on February thirteenth, 1976.” Billy is in fact right with this prediction. Realizing everything is planned out, Billy ends his search for meaning. He understands that he can do nothing to stop the senseless acts, which take place. Like the Tralfamadores, he must try to concentrate on the good moments and not on the bad ones. He could do nothing to stop them or to change them.
He points out that the people in the novel "are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces" (164). Billy knows that he is going to die anyway, regardless of what he does or does not do, and he plainly wants to remain unscathed during his journey. Vonnegut used this publication as a vehicle to show that it is not enough to live a life to its end, the approach that Billy employed.
Billy Pilgrim time travels to various moments in his life at random, which suggests he has no power over his mind and the memories that haunt him. He “is spastic in time, (and) has no control over where he is going next” (Vonnegut 43), as he struggles to make sense of his past. Billy’s ability to remember events in an erratic sequence, mirrors the happenings of war. War is sudden, fast paced, and filled with unexpected twists and turns. Billy cannot forget what he experienced during his time as a soldier, and in turn his mind subconsciously imitates this hectic quality of war. This behavior proves that although the war is over, “psychologically, Billy has never fully left” (Vees-Gulani). For many soldiers, especially those who were prisoners of war (POW), it is inevitable that their mind will not be like it once was (Vees-Gulani).
Billy is also traumatized by the extreme loss in his life. Everywhere he looks, he experiences great loss. First his father dies in a hunting accident, then he gets in a plane crash and everyone aboard dies but him, and while he is in the hospital recuperating, his wife dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. There is so much death surrounding his life, that it is no wonder Billy has not tried to kill himself yet.
He has seen so much death all through the war and the bombing of Dresden. In Slaughterhouse Five whenever any living thing dies because of the war, medical reasons or accident the first comment by Billy is “So it goes”. “The real Iron Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a sort of boiler which was shaped like a women on the outside-and lined with spikes. The front of the women was composed of two hinged doors. The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly. There were two special spikes where his eyes would be. There was a drain at the bottom to let out all the blood. So it goes” (36). One of the most gruesome deaths described in the book has no emotional effect on Billy. The war wipes out the sentimental mindset of death from the minds of Billy and others who experience the destructiveness in
At some point in everybody’s life they feel the sorrow and anguish of losing somebody. The the stories “Nashville Gone to Ashes” and “When It’s Human Instead of When It’s Dog”, both a widow and widower are not able to move on with their life after the loss of their loved one. In both cases the mister and the widow both come to the conclusion that their significant other is not coming back leading them to find ways to cope with their deaths, move on and function the best they can with their lives.
In fact, the abundance of death desensitizes the characters present since the novel is only a “collage with mere silhouettes of human figures” (Schatt 123). Death also desensitizes the reader’s feelings about it. Since there are a plethora of deaths in Slaughterhouse-five to the extent that it almost seems just like a list, the reader does not have enough time to mourn each death. On Mother Night, Vonnegut set up a dramatic death for Campbell with flair, by signing off with “Goodbye, cruel world!
...ho never recovered after experiencing the death of his entire family. Through substance abuse, affairs with Risa Walker, and his use of memory to escape the reality that his family is no more, he proves to be the least successful character in the novel at coping with death. The new questions then become whether or not one ever has such access in order to pull through grief, or, does someone even want to? Reading about Billy he shows us how we should not cope with death, we learn that what is needed at times like this is someone by your side, someone you can lean on, and someone to love you, all of which Billy really does not have. Most human beings do not have that someone to help them cope with death so the responsibility of moving on then falls on them. It is up to them to decide if they want to move on or live the rest of their lives replaying that tragic event.
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.
Death and Reality in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates
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
O’Brien figured out that even if someone died, you can still make them alive by telling their stories. Linda is O’Brien’s example of storytelling being the healing process of pain, confusion, and sadness that comes with unexpected death. After she dies, he uses his imagination to bring her back to life, and he also believes that the death can still be alive through literature. The death of Linda portrays how soldiers can deal with death in Vietnam even when they encounter so many people dying in the war.
Additionally, we learn that while he was recuperating, his wife died of carbon-monoxide poisoning trying to get to the hospital to see him. The entire story is basically told in Chapter 2.It is also in this chapter that Billy,"time-travels for the 1st time The series of scenes and fragmentations of Billy 's life in chapter 2 alone unnerving. Had we leaned the corse of events in a normal chronological sequence, rather than tidbit here and there, the events would have been m,ore understandable. We learn of his wife 's death in chapter 2, yet we learn the full circumstances of her death in chapter
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
The books we read in Creative Writing are Slaughterhouse-Five and The Things They Carried. Slaughterhouse-Five was written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1969 and The Things They Carried was written by Tim O’Brien in 1990. The Things They Carried and Slaughterhouse-Five are two examples of anti-war literature. Slaughterhouse-Five is a story describing the time traveling between periods of time in Billie’s life. Billie is an American prisoner in the Dresden, Germany. The Things They Carried is a journal of the events that occurred in the Vietnam War that the author writes from the Alpha Company. These two stories are similar and different in their description of the horrors of war. They are classic anti-war books. The two books are successful in blending fiction and nonfiction items to demonstrate dreamlike and unbelievable descriptions that give a complete picture of war.