Free Will In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

The plot of Slaughterhouse- Five revolves around World War Two, especially the bombing of Dresden from a soldier’s perspective. Vonnegut vividly describes the destructive nature of war through accounts of ambush, mistreatment of prisoners of war, and massacres. However, he also expresses the mentally and emotionally damaging effects of war with the pure insanity of Billy Pilgrim. One of many instances illustrating Billy’s altered state of mind in the war is when he arrives in a prisoner of war camp. The English prisoners put on a production of Cinderella for their American guests and following a comical line Billy loses control. “He not only laughed – he shrieked. He went on shrieking until he was carried out of the shed into another, where the hospital was” (Slaughterhouse 98). This is a single example of the deplorable state of Billy’s mental sanity. The reader is already aware that Billy also begins to hallucinate and have crazy notions that he was abducted by aliens. Billy even acquires a sort of catchphrase that clearly demonstrates how emotionally distant Billy has become because of the war. Every time death is brought up, Billy has only one thing to say about it: “So it goes” (Slaughterhouse 214). This shows that Billy has become numb to pain, anguish, fear, and even life itself. To Billy, the end of the war did not actually bring freedom, but trapped him inside the horrors of his memories and deranged

War is the third topic that is heavily satirized in Slaughterhouse Five. First, Billy almost gets killed because he is time-traveling. Second of all, Vonnegut always says “so it goes” (12) whenever someone dies, so it sort of mocks death. Also, he is given a woman’s jacket when he becomes a POW and it mocks his position in the war also. On the nights of February 13-14 in 1944 the city of Dresden, Germany was subjected to one of the worst air attacks in the history of man. By the end of the bombing 135,000 to 250,000 people had been killed by the combined forces of the United States and the United Kingdom. Dresden was different then Berlin or many of the other military targets which were attacked during World War II because it was never fortified or used for strategic purposes and, therefore, was not considered a military target. At one point, Billy watches a war movie about WWII. He watches it regularly, showing how reality is.

When British and American forces raided the city with firebombs, Vonnegut and his fellow captives were saved due to their underground imprisonment. The bombing killed more than 135,000 people, most of whom were innocent civilians, more than the deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. After the bombing, Vonnegut was given the morbid task of carrying the corpses from Air-Raid shelters, including women, children, and the elderly; dead from concussions, fire, or suffocation. In a letter to his father, Vonnegut described his job and the reaction of the locals, “Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge pyres in the city,” (Boomhower). His distressing internment in Dresden not only furthered his anti-war sentiments, but also established a reoccurring theme in his books: the irrationality of government and the senselessness of war. Vonnegut saw the bombing of Dresden and the slaughter of innocents as wasteful and meaningless. He could not comprehend the purpose of destroying a “beautiful” and fully functional civilization (Wiswell 5). The annihilation of the city and lives of the innocent affirmed his views of war as a waste, and even lead to his feeling that, “civilization ended in World War I” (Vitale). This view indicated Vonnegut believed World War II was a meaningless act committed by the uncivilized.

The moment he meets the Tralfamadorians, “Billy's will [is] paralyzed by a zap gun aimed at him from one of the portholes” (Vonnegut). The moment displays the concept of having no free will. Throughout the book, the Tralfamadorians have the saying: “And so it goes” (Vonnegut). This saying emphasizes the relation with Tralfamadorians and free will. The saying means that things will happen how they’re going to happen and one has to embrace it. It coincides with the “Tralfamadorian idea that we can do nothing about anything fully” (Vanderwerken). For example, Billy has a conversation with the Tralfamadorians which goes:

Journalist John Tierney, in his article, “Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It’s the Only Choice,” explores the notion of free will and exhibits how belief or disbelief in free will affects an individual’s life. By posing a hypothetical situation through rhetorical questions, incorporating experimental research, and using accusatory diction towards the opposing perspective, Tierney conveys his perception that a regard for free will allows for individuals to gain a greater sense of morality and ambition, even if the notion of free will is still disputed.

But ignoring death and its suffering is exactly what Billy should not be doing, Vonnegut suggests. To do so makes him, like the Tralfamadorians, alien and inhuman. He has no sense of his own mortality, an awareness he needs in order to understand that, as Stephen Marten has observed, "life is valuable not because it is infinite but because it is so scarce" (11).

This way of thinking is wrong. The novel Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut addresses the idea of free will. He uses aliens known as Tralfamadorians to express the fact that he believes time is not linear but existing all at once and thing can not be changed. Also that free will is an human construct since we as humans can not see the bigger picture of the universe. Vonnegut is trying to understand why thing happen that we can not change or control.

Often people have questioned their place in the world and the significance of their choices. It is natural to wonder if all things are fated or if one can truly control their own destiny. People are born one day without so choosing, they are raised and taught without willing it. We cannot truly be sure that we gain autonomy as we grow older; perhaps none of our choices will ever be meaningful. In his novel Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut explores some thoughts on this. Vonnegut demonstrates that our free will is limited to insignificant decisions in our daily lives, and there are any number of things much greater than any of us that cannot be altered. Among those things is the eventuality of death. All things which live will someday cease to, and in the meantime they will undoubtedly suffer, but nothing can be done about it so you need to find a way to accept it; as said by Friedrich Nietzsche, “to live is to

Throughout Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” Billy Pilgrim is enabled to travel to past and future parts of his life. Through the ability to be unstuck in time, and the regonzination that free will is just a mere illusion, Billy is able to see things “all at once.” He comes to the recognition that death, free will, and time itself are all illusions and out of our control. Through the assistance of time travelling, Billy sees the value of time in a whole new form.

In the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the author's tone exists with a strong presence. His tone, the general attitude of a piece of writing, emphasises certain parts of the book when he wants to get a message across, as well as revealing the themes of the illusion of free will through acceptance and indifference, and the destructiveness of war through realism.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut explains his experience of the World War II bombing of Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut's creative antiwar novel shows the audience the hardships of the life of a soldier through his writing technique. Slaughterhouse Five is written circularly, and time travel is ironically the only consistency throughout the book. Vonnegut outlines the life of Billy Pilgrim, whose life and experiences are uncannily similar to those of Vonnegut. In Chapter 1, Kurt Vonnegut non-fictionally describes his intentions for writing the book. Vonnegut personally experienced the destruction of Dresden, and explains how he continuously tried to document Dresden but was unsuccessful for twenty-three years after the war. Vonnegut let

The Tralfamadorians, as mentioned earlier, believe that nothing is preventable, for example, their pilot pressing the button that leads to the destruction of the universe. “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, and always will exist” (pg. 27), say the Tralfamadorians. As Billy conceives the idea that the war could not have been prevented, it absolves him of all the guilt he had amassed as a result of the war: the fact that he survived, and that fact that he had a good job, as well as a family. The concept behind this is one that involves ‘free will’ . As the Tralfamadorians project the idea that there is no such thing as ‘free will’, Billy is assured implicitly that he did not have a choice in his course of action, and is hence, ‘free’ of any moral responsibility.

In the Slaughter Five, we learned that the Tralfamadorians do not believe in the concept of free will. The reason why they do not believe in the concept of free will is because they view time as 4 dimensional. Unlike the Earthlings, the Tralfamadorians can see the past, present, and future all at once. Therefore, they believe in fate that everything has already happened and there is nothing anyone can do to prevent that.

This book can be quite confusing if not read with utmost care. Because the main character, Billy, becomes “unstuck in time,” (29) the book does not go in chronological order. That is solely because of this fact one must analyse the plot, making sure one does not get confused. To start out in the explanation of the plot in Slaughterhouse Five one must first look at where the action starts to incline, otherwise known as the rising action. Rising action would be best represented as Vonnegut’s character Billy “was taken prisoner by the Germans” (30). It is here where the rising action is because suspense is created, which locks the reader into the book, which makes them want to keep reading. This is where the reader becomes apprehensive about the characters safety. After the rising action comes the climax of the story. The climax is the moment of the most intensity in the story. The climax includes the reason why this book was written; Dresden. The most intense moment in this book is when Billy Pilgrim traveled to the time that “...Dresden was destroyed.” (226). To the reader this gives them information which they have been waiting for since they Vonnegut first mentioned it. Although a reader could infer what happened to Dresden the reader didn’t know what happened to Billy in Dresden, including whether he was hurt or not. In this case Billy was not hurt because he was “down in the meat locker…[which] was a very safe shelter.” (226). Although since the plot is always flashing back and forth between the present and past the reader knew that Billy did not die. Lastly is the part where all the loose ends are tied up. This is also called the falling action. The falling actions in this book occurs when Billy is about to present his insight on his findings of the subject of death, which the Tralfamadorians taught him. Billy was finally able to conclude that “we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may seem to be…” (269).

B. Because the Tralfamadorians have taught Billy that time does not change, that it “simply is,” it removes the sense of free will. In the beginning of the story, Billy, home from war is beginning to write papers to a newspaper about how he was abducted by aliens. In the war, Billy is sort of an outcast, as he was not supposed to be in the front lines in the first place, so he doesn’t fit in with the rest of the soldiers.