Imagery In Slaughterhouse-Five

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Free Will: Playing the Game
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, once said, “life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.” In the anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, author Kurt Vonnegut takes a closer look at the ideas mentioned by Nehru through the protagonist Billy Pilgrim. Billy, a World War II veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, struggles to adjust to post-war life. To distance himself from the horrid experiences of the war, he imagines that he can travel through time as well as go to the fictitious planet of Tralfamadore. Throughout the novel, the Tralfamadorians, the aliens that inhabit the planet, present Billy with the idea that everyone has a predestined fate and that free will does not exist. However, Vonnegut uses diction and imagery in Slaughterhouse-Five to …show more content…

To show the importance of exercising free will, Vonnegut first employs descriptive imagery. In the scene where Billy is taken aboard the spaceship, the Tralfamadorians ask if Billy has any questions. To this, “Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: ‘Why me?’” (97). Most people would be panicking if they were abducted by aliens, yet Billy’s calm demeanor suggests that he is very unconcerned with his situation and accepts the abduction as his fate. Vonnegut ridicules Billy’s apathetic perspective on life by showing how his unwillingness to change his situation leads to his isolation and senseless lifestyle. To answer Billy’s question, the Tralfamadorians ask him whether he has ever seen bugs trapped in amber. Billy responds yes: “Billy in fact, had a paperweight in his office, which was a blob of

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