How Does Billy Pilgrim's Progress Show Materialism

Billy Pilgrim’s Progress: Exploring Materialism and Violence in Postwar America

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is a Christian allegory noted as being one of the most impactful literary compositions in all of English literature. One of the novel’s primary motifs is sleep (Fish 2). Sleep is depicted as a form of beguilement, as dreams begot from sleep serve to distract people from the perpetration of sinister deeds. Thus, dreams, a superficial entity, mask miscreancy in society. Kurt Vonnegut extracts this message and contorts it to fit into his own narrative, Slaughterhouse-Five. It is interesting to note that Vonnegut, a staunch atheist, not only echoes Bunyan’s commentary on society in Slaughterhouse-Five, but he also models his characters

Instead of directly confronting his experiences in war, he uses the materialistic world of Tralfamadore as an escape from his memories of World War II. On Tralfamadore, he lives in a house carpeted “in federal gold” (Vonnegut 143). Additionally, Billy experiences pleasure in the form of Montana Wildhack, a pornographic star with whom he sires a child. Yet, he cannot fully escape the ever present violence that is ingratiated in human society; on the wall of his comfortable house in Tralfamadore, “there was a picture of a cowboy killing [another cowboy]” (Vonnegut 143). This exemplifies how ultraviolence is an undeniable and unaddressed reality underlying both Billy’s psyche and postwar

Vonnegut describes a sumptuous banquet in vivid detail. He comments on a “cauldron full of golden soup… [with bubbles that] surfaced with lethargical majesty” (Vonnegut 121). After providing a thorough description of the deceptively pleasant meal, Vonnegut then mentions that the candles adorning the table “were of German origin… [They] were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State. So it goes” (Vonnegut 122). Thus, the illustrious description of the banquet serves as a reflection of society’s materialism, and the brusque mention of the candles’ creation is demonstrative of society’s treatment of violence as normal and unworthy of in depth discussion. Events that reiterate this message frequently occur throughout the novel; they often earn an irreverent “so it goes” to reflect to the blasé attitude maintained by society toward violence