Grief in Slaughterhouse Five

Grief in Slaughterhouse Five

It seems as though all we hear on the news lately is bad news. So it goes, right? After all, if we took to heart all the tragedies that occur everyday in the world we'd never get out of bed in the morning. We would have an overload of grief so heavy that we'd probably all die of a broken heart. What we sometimes forget is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Likewise, every time someone dies another is born. Every time a marriage ends in divorce, a newlywed couple celebrates their honeymoon somewhere else in the world. The world is in a constant state of renewal. So why do we only notice the bad things? Probably because we're human. Even though the bulk of our problems are self-inflicted or man-made, they still come as a shock to us nearly every time. We have created an absurd time to live in. So now what? How do we deal with it? How should we react to the horrors of war, heartache, and famine? Do we try to solve our problems all at once, or do we sit back and watch things fall apart? Kurt Vonnegut has an interesting idea of what to do, as is shown in his novel, Slaughter House Five. Vonnegut's prescription for dealing with the tragic absurdity of the twentieth century is to simply not deal with it.

In his novel, Vonnegut shows that he is more inclined to sit back and watch than to let things effect him. Being an anti-war novel, his book is filled with shocking events and gruesome deaths. But Vonnegut portrays death as something trivial. Every time someone dies or something bad happens where the reader might think "oh my gosh, that's awful!" Vonnegut says, "so it goes." It's as if he saying that that kind of thing happens all the time and since no on...

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...e past (or future) like Billy. A lot of people do this. They either dwell in the past and aren't able to get over things that happened a long time ago, or they have such a hard time dealing with the present that they choose to live in denial and think everything is just how it has always been. This is a very immature solution to handling the world's absurdities. We don't have the choice to "flip the channels" in our lives like Billy does; however we often flip the channel when the news comes on. But we can't just ignore our problems and expect them to go away. That never works for anybody. Nor does denial, which living in the past is, plain and simple. We have to deal with things in a more mature way. As Vonnegut subtly points out, we have to help the things we can and understand the things we can't, and hopefully we will never lose sight of the difference.