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Death In Kurt Vonnegut's The Happy Garden Of Life

838 Words4 Pages

Without Natural Death
How would you feel if death was overcome? In the short story 2BR02B by Kurt Vonnegut, old age was crushed and population control was in place. In order for a newborn child to live someone had to volunteer to die. Edward Wehling Jr. was waiting for his wife to give birth to triplets. This indicated that they needed three people to step forward to die in order for all three of his kids to survive. So far Wehling only had one volunteer, his grandfather. Wehling found the three people to die for his triplets to survive. A painter was painting a mural called “The Happy Garden of Life”. In the mural there were doctors and nurses in white planting and taking care of plants. The people in purple were making certain that …show more content…

“The mural he was working on depicted an immaculate garden. Men and women in white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings, sprayed bugs, spreading fertilizer. Men and women in purple uniforms pulled up weeds cut down plants that were old and sickly, raked leaves, carried refuse to trash-burners” (pg. 1, line 12-14). This text evidence proves that the people in this time saw life as something that should be pulled away. The people in purple pulled weeds which symbolized killing someone at the Ethical Suicide Studios. They referred to life as something as important as a weed. Weeds are not important at all so they are saying that life has no importance. “He pointed to a figure in purple who was sawing a dead branch from an apple tree” (pg. 2, line 53-54). Some people might see these lines of text and think, “The purple person was just helping the garden out by doing their job,” but clearly the purple person in the mural was a symbol to show that people were killing people as casually as you would saw off a dead limb. The dead limb is really a human being how was killed. In the mural it shows the people in white and purple are raising and killing their own crops so that they can live off of their crops and live a long happy

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