Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Book Review Example

How is Billy Pilgrim affected by his Tralfamadorian experience and the Tralfamadorian philosophies of time, life, and death?

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back

where all those people and their homes had been.

But she did look back and I love her for that,

because it was so human.

So she was turned to a pillar of salt.

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Thesis

Billy Pilgrim’s acceptance of Tralfamadorian philosophy of life, death, and time has greatly affected his understanding of the surrounding world and of his own life. But the most important feature about his Tralfamadorian experience is that it has given him a feeling of consolation and the desire to share this consolation with other people.

Introduction

The main aspect of the Tralfamadorian vision of life that Billy takes for himself as the basis for his new life philosophy – is that a person has absolutely no control over one’s own life, it is only possible to control what one thinks about it. It seems to me that Billy has accepted such a philosophy for the most part because it had a lot of allusions to his own life. It could be said that before his trip to Tralfamadore Billy’s motto in life was expressed with the words from the Bible – “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference” (60). Even though after the war Billy was leading seemingly quite a happy life – he had a wife, kids, successful job, good and steady income, and a comfortable home – still there was no meaning in it for him. And the most important thing about his life was that Pilgrim didn’t really try to find this meaning. He wasn’t trying to change anything in his life and he wasn’t striving to understand why everything happened as it did – “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future” (60). Therefore, the Tralfamadorian philosophy of life acceptance truly satisfied Billy, as there was no need even to attempt to change something in his life.

Together with Tralfamadorians Billy started to believe that there is no free will and people do everything they do not because they choose to do those things, but simply because they must do them and there is no other choice, we are simple “stuck in amber”. It is in human character to believe that there is a free will and we exercise control over certain things is our lives. As one of the Tralfamadorians said – “I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will” (86). Therefore, Tralfamadorins not simply believed that there is no free will, but more importantly they didn’t even have such an idea of free will. For them it was simply a human illusion and even though people think that they have certain control over their lives, still all their choices are predestined. And thus Billy also totally rejects the idea of free will in the sense that humans understand it, and starts to believe that free will means that one is simply free to exist in that sort of life which is proposed to him by destiny – “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does” (198). This kind of fatalism brings a great deal of consolation to Billy.

At the same time the thing that had truly changed for Pilgrim after his abduction by the aliens is his interpretation of the events that were happening in his life. As Billy understood that he has no control over his time-travelling and that he can do nothing to change it, he simply decided to take advantage of his knowing in advance of the things that are going to happen to him. He also takes the advice of Tralfamadorians not to worry about the negative aspects of his life, but rather to concentrate on the positive ones. Pleasant moments last forever and people should re-live them – that is another one of Tralfamadorian concepts of life.

The Tralfamadorian vision of time is quite similar to that of life. The time is structured in a certain way simply because it can’t be structured otherwise. Another important point about time that Tralfamadorians shared with Billy is that time is beyond anyone’s control. They also believed that time is linear and that moments are structured in a certain way no matter the order in which they are perceived. Thus the order in which events take place doesn’t change their meaning – “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no morals, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time” (88). As Marc Leeds says in his book “For them [Tralfamadorins] time is actually circular and closed” (91). Therefore, aliens saw time as a continuum with the past, present and future each existing as a permanent thing. But it seems to me that this Tralfamadorian concept of time was challenged by Billy’s life after his return to Earth, because after he came back from Tralfamadore the meaning of events for him was changing according to their order. Each time that Billy was travelling to his future and re-living it he was making certain interpretations and conclusions out of this ‘another chance’ to live the moment, and the moment of his life to which he traveled next was inevitably effected by these interpretations and conclusions. Not in the sense of why the event was happening, but rather in the sense of Billy’s emotions about that event.

Death was viewed by Tralfamadorians quite in the same way as life and time. According to them death will come as it should come and nothing can change that:

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes’. (27)

They also believed that death serves for a constant improvement, therefore it is absolutely a necessary and positive thing; and such an idea makes an allusion to Darwin’s theory of spices’ survival. As Billy already knows when and how he will die, this Tralfamadorian view on death gives him a great deal of comfort. After his communication with Tralfamadorians Billy starts to express his attitude towards death with a phrase “So it goes”, this becomes something like his new life motto. Now, after his return from Tralfamadore, Billy stops thinking that there are some things in his life that he can change as he previously thought (“courage to change the things I can…”). Now everything that happens with Billy (especially negative events) is accompanied by the phrase “So it goes”.

I think that Tralfamadorian philosophy in general is aimed at providing feelings of consolation and comfort, but it seems to me that such feelings destroy any chance for development and improvement. The acceptance of things and events as they are is really a comfortable position, it saves one’s nerves, but it doesn’t bring any dignity with it. When people stop being aware and afraid of death and all the horrors of wars, they become mentally dead. “From his [Billy’s] perspective, war is not a heroic contest between the forces of good and evil, but a senseless slaughter with many victims and no villains” (Marvin 113). This is the moral that Vonnegut wanted to share with us. A lot of critics say that Slaughterhouse-Five propagandizes neutral attitude towards death, but it seems to me that Vonnegut wanted to show us how horrible it is when people stay neutral regarding such things as war and death.

Sometimes it seems that in his life Billy was not a participant, but merely an observer. I think that the conscious realization of his life came to him for the first time when he heard the Febs’ singing and exactly at that point the remembrance (not the time-travel) of Dresden bombing emerged in his mind. At that moment he realized that before he wasn’t truly able to analyze this event and the consequences that it had for him, but he simply accepted it. At that moment he also came to realize that although he loves his son Robert he doesn’t actually know him. It seems to me that in such a way Billy had moved from a mere acceptance to the beginning of realization. And at that moment, not knowingly, he broke one of the major points of Tralfamadorian philosophy – to accept life as it is without trying to make any transformations in it.

At the same time for me there is some sort of inconsistency in Billy’s actions. On one hand he absolutely accepts the Tralfamadorian philosophy of life acceptance and acts upon it. For example, he knows that the plane will crush, but he does nothing to prevent this event and to warn other passengers about it. But on the other hand, Billy decides to spread the Tralfamadorian philosophy in order to explain people the true nature of time and to bring them consolation, and in such a way he exercises his own free will and brings difference to people’s lives. It seems to me that if Billy was truly following the Tralfamadorian philosophy, at that point he would simply accept the fact that people are ignorant about the true meaning of time and life and thus he would just relax and do nothing to change this fact. Yes, it may be said that once again it was the destiny of Billy to prophesize Tralfamadorian philosophy on Earth that’s why he started to do it. But if there is nothing to be changed then there is no use in prophesying that any attempt for change is futile.

The conclusion may be drawn that after the abduction by Tralfamadorians Billy finally came to his own understanding of happiness. He came to realize that happiness is only possible when a person forgets the past and stops worrying about the future. When one realizes that certain events are inevitable exactly at that moment one can simply start being happy. This was Billy’s new life philosophy and experience that he wanted to share with other people. And it seems to me that this desire to share with others and to console others was the greatest contribution to Billy Pilgrim’s life and the most important impact that the Tralfamadorian experience and philosophy had on him. But such a desire to bring happiness and comfort to others is absolutely of human nature, it has nothing to do with Tralfamadorian view on life and happiness.

To sum everything up I can say that Billy Pilgrim was affected by his Tralfamadorian experience in the way that he changed his attitude towards life and events that were happening in it. And it seems to me that if a person can change one’s attitude towards something, then it also possible to change exactly this ‘something’. And this is the lesson that Kurt Vonnegut wanted to teach us through his book Slaughterhouse-Five.

Work Cited

Marvin, Thomas F. Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Reed, Peter J., ed., and Marc Leeds, ed. The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. New York City, NY: Dell Publishing, 1971.