Into The Wild: Billy's Perspective On Faith

He is a handsome sailor who has no idea his age or birthplace/date. He is well liked by his companions. Billy does represent goodness accurately because good has no real root, no beginning or end, it simply is, much like Billy. Though goodness does not equal perfection in this case. Billy does have a defect/flaw, his stutter. Billy explains his stutter as, “sometimes I cannot find the rights words to describe my emotions.” Billy’s innocence and purity are accepted by all but one on the ship, Claggart. Billy also is forgiving, at the end toward the time of his death, he holds no hatred for Captain Vere, instead yelling, “God bless Captain

The most important quote in the book is as follows, “So it goes.”After every instance of death or tragedy, you will read the Tralfamadorian saying “so it goes.” You see, all moments in life are predetermined, death is inescapable, and although your life may someday come to an end, the moments of the past, present, and future exist simultaneously. This brings about a sort of numbness in Billy, because every death he does experience is simply just a moment of someone's life and nothing more. They may seem dead, but they are currently enjoying life in another section of time as well. Free will doesn’t exist, so just like aliens staring at the newly found zoo specimen by the name of Billy Pilgrim, time should also be observed as a specimen of its own.

Moments in Billy's life change instantaneously, not giving Billy a clue to where he will end up next. In one moment, he is sitting in his home typing a letter to the local newspaper about his experience with the Tralfamadorians, and in the next he is a lost soldier of World War II running around behind German lines aimlessly without a coat or proper shoes. He then became a child being thrown into a pool by his father and afterwards a forty-one year old man visiting his mother in an old people's home. In the novel, changes in time are made through transitional statements such as, "Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a jade green mechanical owl." p.56 In the movie there is no such thing and different moments in Billy's life happen instantaneously. Because scenes are continuous as times change, the movie better displays the author's attempt to capture in the notion of being "unstuck in time." On the other hand, the novel does help the audience follow these time changes better by setting it up for the next scene, offering a background of Billy's experiences before they begin through these transitional statements.

Billy Pilgrim's life is far from normal. Throughout most of his adult life he has been moving backwards and forwards through time, from one event to another, in a non-sequential order. At least, this schizophrenic life is hard to understand. Because Vonnegut wants the reader to relate to Billy

This is the Tralfamadorian faith to the point where the is no reason of trying to change anything makes Billy feel like everything he has gone through, no matter how awful, could not have gone any other way. "Little Billy was terrified, because his father had said Billy was going to learn to swim by the method of sink-or-swim. His father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim. It was like an execution. . . . [Billy] dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that."

“If this sort of selectivity had been possible for Billy, he might have chosen as his happiest moment his sun-drenched snooze in the back of the wagon” (Vonnegut 141), this is the same wagon that is described as a “green coffin”. These two things coupled together show that Billy would be content in death. However, what makes this more interesting is the contrast with the moment when the pressures of all he has lived through become too great and causes his emotional dam to break. After being bombarded with death to the point of acceptance, the thing that finally causes Billy to break down is the suffering of an animal. The horses drawing his coffin on wheels along are near death with thirst and exhaustion. When it is pointed out to Billy, it is a breaking point after a backlog of an entire wars worth of horrors. “Later on, as a middle-aged Optometrist, he would weep quietly and privately sometimes” (Vonnegut 197). The softness of the reaction speaks magnitudes about the depth of the emotional

McCarthy uses metaphors to show how Billy feels the same connection to wolves that John felt to horses. He is mourning, and the text shows this by saying that the wolf was “at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh”. This conveys Billy’s immense respect for wolves and the pain he feels at seeing the wolf dead, because he wants to see her running free in the mountains, but he cannot. He thinks that “where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel”. This shows his own fear and marvel towards the wild and free wolves he sees and the wolf he is taking home to

It took much hard work and dedication for Billy to earn enough money and to retrieve his hounds. All his life Billy had wanted his own hounds, and as an opportunity arose he decided to earn the money himself. Billy goes to work performing odd jobs such as selling vegetables to local fishermen and collecting bait and with in time he finally gains enough. Soon Billy begins the journey to retrieve his pups. After dealing with the forests and the townsfolk Billy finally brings home his dogs, his dream come true. Billy learned independence and maturity while earning his hounds.

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).

Billy is faced with the problem of puppy love in chapters 2-4 but he can’t get his pups because they cost too much. He worked for two years catching crawfish, trapping minnows, selling vegetables and roasting ears, and picking blueberries. He reached fifty dollars, ordered the dogs with the help of his grandpa, and went into the city to get the dogs. The other minor problem is moving to the city because Billy’s parents want the kids to have a good education. The family gains enough money and at the end of the book, the family moves the city. The Mom even prays to the dogs because they were the ones that got the

     Many different themes arise in this tale. Firstly, one most note that Billy was given 3 main ‘nicknames;’ Baby Budd, he was seen as a form of Christ, and as Adam from the Garden of Paradise. When seeing all three in the same sentence it brings one to compare and contrast. What do all three essentially have? Innocence. Furthermore, such a quality isn’t lost through yourself but through the actions of others. A Baby doesn’t grow up until his eyes are opened and he is stripped of his purity. Christ was all “good” until he was hanged a

This leads Billy to believe that no matter what he could have done in the past, there is no way he could have avoided his experiences in war. Because of this, Billy does not try to prevent his son from fighting in the Vietnam war, even though he knows the horrors of war. There also are parallels between the Tralfamadorians and the Germans. Both the Germans and the Tralfamadorians lock Billy up and explain to him that he has no free will nor control over his life. When Billy asks why the Tralfamadorians chose to take him, they just respond that there is no why.

Billy was a character of perseverance and hard work this was shown for two years to save up for his dogs. He is hardworking because he worked for two years for for his dogs and he waited for two years. He is also patients because after the two years of

Billy has a history of mental problems he has been institutionalized twice. The first time was when he father died this was while he was in training, before he went off to war. The second time was when he came back from the war. Plus he had the head injury from the plane crash. He only started talking about the Tralfamadorians after the plane. And it's odd that every thing about the Tralfamadorians is from those good old Kilgore Trout novels. Now remember Billy first started to read Trout's novels when he committed himself, this was second time he was in the nut house it was after the war. The whole notion of time, the

Not trusting instincts is a central issue found in this short story. Billy notices that something is unusual about the boarding house he decides to stay at. For example, Billy signs into the sign in book and notices that there are only two names there he slightly recognizes. Dahl writes, “ ‘I’m almost positive it was in the newspapers I saw them’…” (4). Billy notices that it is a little strange that only two people have been here in the past two years. He feels confused and nervous but does not do anything about it. Because of this, Billy Weaver makes the problem worse because he can say something about it, but he decides not to. This shows that Billy has to trust himself. Billy Weaver does not know this lady very well, so he can easily trust