What Is The Theme Of Free Will In Slaughterhouse Five

895 Words2 Pages

In Slaughterhouse-five, supposed time traveler Billy Pilgrim experiences time unlike any other. He travels to the past and the future and witnesses events before and after they happen. This leaves him with a unique understanding of life as well a complete acceptance of everything that is and will be. Billy Pilgrim has this acceptance because the Tralfamadorians, an alien species with acute awareness of the workings of time, described the intricacies of the structure of time to him while he and former porn star Montana Wildhack resided together in a Tralfamadorian zoo. They explained to him that fate determines every aspect of life, and this idea becomes a major philosophy throughout the novel. One of the most prominent themes in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five is that free will is nonexistent. According to the Tralfamadorians, humans are unable to alter the fate of themselves or the world because events and time are constant conditions. Billy Pilgrim understands this concept because he sees events before they happen and relives them after they occur. Billy learned from the Tralfamadorians that “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist” (Vonnegut 34). Therefore, the notion of free will and choice are simply
Billy Pilgrim experiences fully the sides of time unknown to most, such as becoming “unstuck” and traveling freely through ages and events. The Tralfamadorians expose him to their simplistic thought of time, and, because their notion of time can be depressing at times, they advised him to focus on the good moments. After his encounter with the Tralfamadorians, Billy understands that attempting to alter the events he saw in his trips through time was pointless, because free will is simply a banal idea to appease the human species’ sense of greater importance in the

Show More
Related

  • Slaughterhouse Five: Billy Pilgrim and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

    1566 Words  | 4 Pages

    Within the novel Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Billy Pilgrim claims to have come “unstuck” in time. Having survived through being a Prisoner of War and the destruction of Dresden during World War II, and having been a prisoner used to clear away debris of the destruction, there can be little doubt that Pilgrim’s mental state was unstable. Furthermore, it may be concluded that Pilgrim, due to the effects of having been a Prisoner of War, and having been witness to the full magnitude of destruction, suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which caused him to review the events over and over during the course of his life. In order to understand how these factors, the destruction of Dresden and ‘PTSD’, came to make Billy Pilgrim “unstuck” in time, one must review over the circumstances surrounding those events.

    Read More

  • Slaughterhouse Five Hero's Journey

    940 Words  | 2 Pages

    After a dramatic event happens in someone’s life such as war, some people cannot function the same way as they did previously. To make a reference to the novel, "Slaughterhouse five" written by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim’s character experiences war during World War II. Some drastic changes happened in his way of dealing with the fact of surviving a war. He claims to travel in time and to meet Aliens, called the "Tralfamadorian’s". This essay will discuss Billy believing that he is meeting Aliens and traveling in time, but in fact he only has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after surviving the war.

    Read More

  • Slaughterhouse-Five: Futile Search for Meaning

    985 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...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.

    Read More

  • A Comparison of Kurt Vonnegut's Two Novels: Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five

    616 Words  | 2 Pages

    Free will, the ability of organisms to make choices without being influenced by divine intervention, is one of history’s most debated philosophical topics. Kurt Vonnegut discusses this matter in his two novels Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. In the first novel, he writes about a religion based on the idea that God puts us in groups to carry out His will. The second novel talks about a group of aliens from the planet Tralfamadore who say that out of the thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, “Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.” In both novels, the protagonists Jonah and Billy accept their unavoidable fate, and so they don’t worry about life or death. Through his two novels, Vonnegut portrays the futility of believing in free will in a universe controlled by fate.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Free Will In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

    1794 Words  | 4 Pages

    time as a prisoner, Billy learned that humans do not have control of their own free will.

    Read More

  • Morality And Christianity In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

    2076 Words  | 5 Pages

    They explain it to him as simply as they possibly can, “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” (108). Their outlook on time does not lend itself to free will, just as any earthly deterministic institution. Tralfamadorianism is directly related to and used to critique Christianity in Slaughterhouse-Five. In Vonnegut’s Dresden Novel: Slaughterhouse-Five Stanley Schatt reaffirms this idea of free will v.s. determinism, “Since Vonnegut’s novels are usually constructed around two diametrically opposed points of view, it is not surprising that Slaughterhouse-Five is built around the irreconcilable conflict between free will and determinism” (Schatt). Billy benefits greatly from this new cosmic outlook. He believes so much in the teachings of Tralfamadore that he even becomes a Jesus-like figure later in his life, eventually being publicly executed much like his Christian doppleganger. In his article, David L. Vanderwerken discusses the deterministic qualities of Tralfamadorianism, its argument against determinism, and the possible allure of it,

    Read More

  • Slaughterhouse-Five and the Psychological Consequences of War

    1382 Words  | 3 Pages

    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).

    Read More

  • Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

    746 Words  | 2 Pages

    In his powerful novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut tells of a man named Billy Pilgrim who has become unstuck in time. He walks through a door in 1955 and comes out another in 1941. He crashes in a plane in 1968 and ends up displayed in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore making love to Earth porno-star, Montana Wildhack. He ends up in the cellar of a slaughterhouse when Dresden is bombed to ashes during World War II; Billy, his fellow Americans, and four guards were the only ones to live through the bombing. The Boston Globe best explains the book when it says it is “…poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement” (back cover). Vonnegut looks into the human mind of a man, traumatized by war experiences and poor relations with his father, and determines insanity is the result.

    Read More

  • Slaughterhouse Five Literary Analysis

    898 Words  | 2 Pages

    Time concept is a complex idea that resist full understanding thus we can only percept it and determinism is a belief that is adopted by whose can percept time better than the others. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians, who are aliens that can see the fourth dimension. While he was explaining the notion of time to Billy, he uses simile “seeing all time as you might see a stretch of Rocky Mountains.”(85). Kurt Vonnegut indicates that what people live in the present is just an allusion of time. He juxtaposes Billy with Tralfamadorians to show this allusion. While Billy only sees in three dimensions, Tralfamadorians can see the fourth dimension as well. And in the mountain example Billy can only see the 3 side of the mountain, whereas Tralfamadorians see 4 side of it, but they all live in an allusion, because time is such an idea that it is made of infinite sides. It is impossible to dispose of this allusion and see the whole perspective. Vonnegut uses the symbolism in order to show that free-will is jus...

    Read More

  • Goethe & Vonnegut

    1397 Words  | 3 Pages

    Billy Pilgrim has mental problems. Too many to name, in fact. He has difficulty in almost every aspect of life because of these mental problems. Vonnegut has concocted an anti-war novel that blames Billy’s health (or lack thereof) on the trauma of being in a war, but poor Billy has many problems even before the war. He seems to be extremely emotionally detached from all aspects of life. Yes, he gets married and has children, but it seems to be portrayed as somewhat sarcastic and unimportant. This is the danger of being unemotional in life.

    Read More

  • The Concept Of Free Will In The Movie Gattaca

    1385 Words  | 3 Pages

    Imagine starting your day and not having a clue of what to do, but you begin to list the different options and routes you can take to eventually get from point A to point B. In choosing from that list, there coins the term “free will”. Free will is our ability to make decisions not caused by external factors or any other impediments that can stop us to do so. Being part of the human species, we would like to believe that we have “freedom from causation” because it is part of our human nature to believe that we are independent entities and our thoughts are produced from inside of us, on our own. At the other end of the spectrum, there is determinism. Determinism explains that all of our actions are already determined by certain external causes

    Read More

  • Compatibility of Free Will in The Tenseless Theory of Time

    2073 Words  | 5 Pages

    , The debate between free will and fatalism has existed since the conceptualization of time. On one hand, in everyday life, time flows in a uniform fashion. People experience time in which there is a past, present, and a future. Yet, physicists and philosophers see time as something completely different. In fact, they see time as an illusion. Called the tenseless theory of time, time does not flow but this theory views time as a fourth dimension where all past, present, and future events are equal (Callender & Edney, 2004). Essentially, this theory proposes that there is no passage of time and no becoming of future events. As a result, one can view this theory as a “block” universe in which every event that has happened, is happening as of right now, and is going to happen has been set in stone.

    Read More

  • Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five -- A Great American Novel

    1390 Words  | 3 Pages

    After serving in World War Two, Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five about his experiences through Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five is a dark novel about war and death. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental disease that inflicts people who endured a traumatic event. Some of the common symptoms include flashbacks and creating alternate worlds which Billy Pilgrim experienced various times throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim believes he has become “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 29) and travels to different moments throughout his life. Pilgrim is never in one event for long and his flashbacks are triggered by almost everything he does. While his “time-traveling” is sporadic and never to a relevant time, all of Billy Pilgrims flashbacks are connected through actions done in each of the visions. Perhaps the most important flashback occurred at ...

    Read More

  • Billy Pilgrim's Coping Mechanism for PTSD in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

    1243 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck” in time. The question here is, why? The fact of the matter is that he does not actually begin to time-travel. Billy “becomes unstuck” as a coping mechanism to deal with his traumatic experiences during the war. Billy attempts to reorganize his life’s events and cope with a disorder known as post traumatic stress (PTSD).

    Read More

  • Why Is Billy Pilgrim Insane

    1051 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Slaughterhouse-Five” is an anti-war novel. It describes a flesh-and-blood world. Main character is Billy Pilgrim, he is a time traveler in this book, his first name Billy is from the greatest novelist in the USA in 19 century’s novel “Billy Budd” ; and his last name is from “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan. Differently, the main character in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” ’s traveling has meaning and discovering, Billy Pilgrim’s traveling just has violence and escape. In the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut ’s main character, Billy Pilgrim is sane and his time travel is half in his mind half is real. He is looked so innocent and weakness, there is a sentence which is spoken by Billy Pilgrim “So it goes.” (2) This quotation shows that a poignant sense of helplessness.

    Read More

More about What Is The Theme Of Free Will In Slaughterhouse Five

Open Document