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Happiness And Death In Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse-Five'

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Simple Discussion on Happiness and Death
Although many may see Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five as dark and dismal, he writes about nice moments that happen between the time of birth and death through the eyes of the weirdly optimistic character Billy Pilgrim. Most think of time as a linear timeline with everything moving in one direction towards an end goal, which for living creatures seems to be death. Whenever someone thinks of death it’s hard for them to not also talk about time and how much they have left. If time and death are interconnected, who’s to say that’s not such a bad thing after all? In the second chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five we were first introduced to the main character Billy Pilgrim, and within the first couple …show more content…

Billy talked about these nice moments again and again, showing how he had a great appreciation for life, which was reinforced when he met the Tralfamadorians and they explained how time really passes, “If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I 'm grateful that so many of these moments are nice,” (269). When reading this book quite a few of us believed that it proved how monotonous and boring life was, when it really just de-emphasized death and made the lives of the characters much more meaningful. In fact, Slaughterhouse-Five is not Vonnegut’s only novel where his overall message can be found, which is that all life is moving towards death, so we might as well find at least okay-ness, even in the face of doom and gloom. Even though his approach may seem much too simple, it is often difficult for us as humans to think of the chronology of life instead of just the end result of death. In his anthology A Man Without a Country as well as in a plethora of speeches, Vonnegut shares his knowledge and theme of many of his books, "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at

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Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, is a postmodern, anti war novel, involving the main character, Billy Pilgrim, and his transportation through the different moments of his life. The timeline of this particular book ranges all the way from when Billy was a small boy and all the way to his death. Because of the book taking place in many different times of Billy’s life and in many places of it, Kurt Vonnegut both hides and reveals truth in it. Many examples of this can be found throughout the events of Billy’s adventures, most notably before and during the fire bombings of Dresden.

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It brings the reader's into a world of war and death and makes it normal; Many people see death as a bad thing, if they read this book they would be able to see how uncontrollable it is. Vonnegut writes billy as a very quiet, shy person who experiences about as much death as he had in his lifetime. Death and war are both things that no one can control, death happens to everyone one way or another and it’s how you see death that determines how you react to it. In the war Vonnegut and Billy both experience tremendous amounts of lose in such a little amount of time and when you experience that you are no longer in a state of mind where you feel as though death is unnatural and a horrible thing. they simply know what they can’t control and say this “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.”

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Dresden was one of the world’s most beautiful cities full of life and culture up until the Dresden bombing that destroyed innocent civilian lives and burned the historic town of Dresden to ashes during World War II. The bombings, resulting from the ongoing war is named the worst civilian casualty bombings and the most questioned. The bombs dropped by the Allies were unexplained because the bombs were not aimed at any war material headquarters or at a base of any Axis powers. The Dresden bombings were a catastrophic unnecessary point of attack. In Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five, the Dresden bombings are discussed as well as highly influencing to the book as a whole.

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Billy Pilgrim has a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder. He shows many of the symptoms when showing the audience of his time travel and the abduction by the Tralfamadorians. Vonnegut never officially states whether or not these events are true or not. Much of the research that

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The no-space trip: a mirror to our world Literature serves as a mirror to our world, when looking into it closely, it reflects even the most banal aspects of ourselves and the society we live in. Kurt Vonnegut 's Slaughterhouse Five serves as a mean of social criticism. For instance, the creation of Kilgore Trout and the different plots of his books criticize several aspects of society by the use of science fiction such as faith, economy and oil dependency. In chapter nine, Billy Pilgrim stops at a store which has several Trout books. As he reads them, the narrator introduces the resumed plot of each one.

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Vonnegut used satire to emphasize how much people want to avoid dying, while simultaneously acknowledging how painful and endless life can be: “If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice” (269). Instead of being overjoyed at Billy’s notion of death is eternal, Vonnegut expresses appreciation for “those moments are nice” (269) that will be revisited forever. This acts as a sarcastic view of expectations of the joys of eternity, which also serves as a criticism of the fact that eternal life may not always be pleasant when it involves repeating unpleasant events. But more notably, “So it goes” was a key element of satire in Slaughterhouse-Five as it was repeated —one hundred six times— to emphasize the irony of death and hopelessness of war.

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He strives to capture a “beautiful and surprising and deep” meaning in his book, yet, Vonnegut calls the book a “failure” from the very first chapter, because he has come up with nothing more intelligent and deep to say about war than Poo-tee-weet? (Slaughterhouse Five 28). Although that could be Vonnegut’s intention – to show that war is senseless and ugly. The Tralfamadorians say they only look at the the “marvelous moments” in life and ignore all the sad ones. To them, a good book is one containing only the happy moments.

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