Epicac by Kurt Vonnegut

In Larry Lankton’s text, “Beyond the Boundaries” we gradually enter an unknown world that is frightening yet filled with immense beauty for miles. Due to the copper mining industry, a gradual increase of working class men and their families start to migrate to the unknown world with unsteady emotion, yet hope for a prosperous new life. In “Beyond the Boundaries”, Lankton takes us on a journey on how the “world below” transformed the upper peninsula into a functional and accepted new part of the world.

What is it that we find crazy about those who have the courage to do what we won’t? In the compelling novel “Into The Wild” by Jon Krakauer the character and intelligence of the youth in men is questioned. Through the pieced together 200 page novel we are introduced to Christopher Johnson McCandless also known as “Alex Supertramp”. A ripe 24 years of age he chose to question our reality and his meaning of life that is given to us by hitchhiking across America to the Alaskan wilderness, where after four months in the last frontier he is found dead. Krakauer throughout the novel shows that although some admire what McCandless did, others found his final journey “reckless” and “crazy”. Krakauer goes to explain this claim through interviews of those who have encountered McCandless on his adventure and through those who got to know his story.

True freedom is the ability for each person to live as they desire; such a place is described as a utopia. Unfortunately in the dystopian novel, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the novel portrays a completely controlled society that has absolutely no freedom. Although you do have the few dissatisfied individuals who set out for a form of change. These individuals represent the optimistic part of the novel, despite conditioning, drugs and biological engineering; the human naturally wants more to life than just following orders.

“If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you win no victories.” (Richard M. Nixon). In his investigative biography, Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer, expresses that even though young people can be ignorant and take treacherous risks, these can be used as knowledge enhancers and can be life changers.

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five he talks about many different themes. He quotes, makes fun of, and uses many different themes. I would like to talk about one major theme in Slaughterhouse Five, religion. In the book he uses religion to teach important lessons, he used it as inspiration, and he even pokes fun at religion.

“Happiness is only real, when shared.” - Jon Krakauer Into the wild. Jon Krakauer, the author of Into the Wild told the story of Chris McCandless. Chris escaped reality and went to go live off the land in Alaska, hoping to live a simpler life. In the novel, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Chris McCandless shared a similar philosophy with Jack London, as they both have a strong passion for Alaska, they both appreciated they beauty of nature, and both wanted to be reborn.

Harrison Bergeron by “Kurt Vonnegut” is set in the year 2081, where all the people have been made equal through mental and physical handicaps. No one is slower, weaker, or smarter than anyone else. Harrison Bergeron who is taken from is family when he was fourteen years old has escaped. He takes off is handicaps, declares himself emperor and chooses one of the ballerinas to become his empress. After dancing and flying, Handicap General Diana Moon Glampers shoots them both dead. The theme of this story is total equality is not ideal as people may believe. It’s a mistaken goal that can result into a dangerous outcome.

In the short story "2BR02B" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., population balance overrules all aspects of a persons' life as well as the society that they live in. In order for more people to be brought into the world, others must die or be killed off to maintain what is thought to be an ideal population of humans on the planet. The quote "We humans have become a disease, the Human Pox" by Dave Foreman relates to this story exceptionally well because it basically implies that humans are rapidly multiplying and that if we do not take growth rate into consideration, soon enough, our population is going to be too high for anything to function in the correct manner. If we have a lot of people, it means that there will be an increase in the amount of resources

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut takes places on two contrasting planets. One is Earth, where war tears apart families and minds, and the other is Tralfamadore, where supernatural alien beings share their extended knowledge of the world. Vonnegut uses the two planets, Earth and Tralfamadore, to show the contrasting ideas of chaos and order, and that human actions have limitations that render them helpless against a meaningless universe.

Christopher McCandless may be one of the most intriguing characters in nonfiction literature. In Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, Chris McCandless gives up all of his worldly possessions in order to move to Alaska and travel alone into the wilderness. Chris seemed to lead a very privileged life, as he came from a fairly well off family. Chris was intelligent, having graduated from Emory University with a degree in anthropology and history. There is much ambiguity as to why Chris suddenly decides to leave his family behind and travel by himself -- although it is clear that Chris’s initial belief was that the best way to live life was alone, surrounded by nature. The overarching question is whether Chris intentionally tried to kill himself when he traveled alone into the heart of Alaska. Those who believe he did contend that he did not make enough of an effort to extract himself from the negative situations in which he found himself. They argue that Chris felt that he was betrayed by his father, and that he tries to kill himself in order to get away from his family as a whole. Yet Chris McCandless did not in fact have a death wish, and his death was the result of his miscalculating how difficult living in the wild would actually be. This resulted from Chris’s excessive pride. His main motivation to go into the wild was to run far away from his family -- who by blinding him, indirectly caused him to miscalculate.

The short story EPICAC is written by Kurt Vonnegut. It is a fictional text about a very intelligent and expensive computer, EPICAC, built by Dr. Ormand Von Kleigstadt to solve complex worldly problems. The narrator works with EPICAC on the night shift along with another mathematician; Pat Kilgallen, whom the narrator wishes to marry, but because of his lack of romance and poetic skills she keeps turning him down. That is how one day the narrator “invents” a number-for-letters code explaining his real problem in life to EPICAC. EPICAC recognizes the code and answers to it. The narrator wins Pat’s hand in marriage because of the poetry EPICAC has written to her, but because the

Slaughterhouse-five strives to remember the tragedy of the bombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut constructs his novel around a main character who becomes “unstuck in time” (23). Billy Pilgrim’s life is told out of order, which gives him a different perspective than the rest of the world. Billy lives through his memories, and revisits events in his life at random times and without warning. Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim to the Tralfamadorian way of thinking about memory and time so that he can cope with being unstuck in time. The Tralfamadorian ideology is set up as an alternative to the human ideology of life. In the novel Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut constructs a reality where memory is unproductive through the Tralfamadorian

“Master and Man” by Leo Tolstoy is a story that explores the dynamics between a peasant, Nakita and his master,Vasillii Andriech. Andriech foolishly risks both of their lives, when they venture to another town in inclement weather to secure a business deal. Unfortunately, Andreich's impatience and greed ultimately leads to his demise. At the end of the story Nikita dies and is denied the same bliss that Vasillii Andreich experiences in death; in order to solidify the dichotomy between these two men, demonstrate how Andriech cheated Nakita, and he uses Nakita's lackluster death to amplify Andriech's extraordinary passing.

Humans have always had a complicated relationship with non-human animals. This relationship has always benefitted the needs of humans, with little consideration for animals’ needs. Some animals are tortured for entertainment, some are butchered for food and others are taken from their habitat and family, and forced to be pets for humans. These are all examples of the ways humans have exploited animals for their own satisfaction. Hal Herzog’s essay “Animals Like Us” describes the complicated relationship that humans and animals have, and how difficult it is to determine what is ethical when dealing with animals. Jonathan Safran Foer makes a similar observation in his essay “The Fruits of Family Trees” of the ethical issues in the

The essay “The Naked Face” written by Malcom Gladwell is about the ability of recognizing the meaning behind someone’s facial expressions. He starts the essay with a life or death situation between an inner city police officer and a suspect that both are pointing guns at each other. The officer clearly has the right to shoot the suspect, but decided not to base on a hunch that the armed suspect was not a threat (Gladwell 24). Gladwell then demonstrates that the police officer is one out of a thousand people that scored really well on a psychology test to determine if someone is lying or telling the truth based on facial expressions (Gladwell 59). Gladwell’s essay then continues with