Slaughter house five Essay Example for Free

Slaughter house five Essay Slaughter house five is a combination of helplessness as everything that happens is destined to happen and the choice to feel good or bad about the events is the curse of human kind. Human life is led under the illusion that there is a choice to stop, prevent or modify the events, while, in reality the only power accorded to man is the power of observation and attaching his emotions to the events that unfold. The explicit message of the book is that Billy Pilgrim has the ruinous capacity of knowing about his entire life but has no power to modify or protect himself from any pre-ordained events. The implicit message seems that there is a scheme to all events in history which has strands from various events leading to it without the individual components or players ever having the complete knowledge of the consequences of their contribution. A survivor’s guilt associated with the autobiographical part of the novel which the author tries to shrug away by the end of the first chapter is actually a clever disguise to mask the coming â€Å"unstuck in time† of Billy Pilgrim. A survivor of one of the most gruesome elements of the world war, paradoxically carried out by the â€Å"white† forces of the allies, Pilgrim suddenly becomes capable of four dimensional thinking and time ceases to be a linear component of his mindscape. It is a whole unit and has no chance of being altered or deciphered. It simply is. As the loud speaker in the trafalmadorian flying saucer answers Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why. (77) The explicit and the implicit do seem to collude to infer the inevitability of world-historic and human-personal events, an intricately inter twined web which defies reason. Repetition serves more than one purpose in the novel. Billy keeps returning to Dresden, which is a defining moment in his life and the repeated trips to the scenes around the raging massacre is a reinforcement of the effect one singular event can have on the stream of consciousness of a person. Even equipped with the time travelling four dimensional capabilities of trafalmadorians, Billy is unable to escape revisiting his one defining moment. It is left to the reader’s judgment to decipher if there is anything special about these repetitions. Readers are left wondering if Billy is unable to help revisiting this instance or is the author obsessed with this particular phase. The absence of a definitive answer to this question adds to the intrigue behind this repetition. In a novel that takes conventional logic and builds an inverse pyramid around it, it is rather difficult to pick the logical strands of the work. However, there is a sound logic once the framework of such logic is accepted along the lines drawn by the author for Billy Pilgrim. As Billy knows the circumstances of his murder (he sees time as a whole entity and not as a continuous stream which exposes the present in any linear order). This makes him fearless of Paul Lazarro’s claims of revenge in the prison hospital. He already knew that he shall be killed by the same Lazarro, but after many years in a balkanized United States. Once the rules of this specific logic are grasped, then the reading of the novel becomes easier because the irony of any event is that it is pre determined and pans out exactly in the order it has been laid out in the unit of time. The various fears of Billy are brought into the fore through the various times he visits with his unusual prowess. His mother’s weak questioning about her ageing, his father’s crude tactics of teaching him swimming when he was really small by throwing him into the deep side of the pool are efforts at revisiting past fears and future anxieties. The contrast is the switching between past and future. Dresden contrasts with itself on each occasion Billy visits that place. In one instance it is a highly civilized beautiful city, once it is a raging inferno due to allied bombings and Billy, along with other PoWs helps load the corpses. In another instance Dresden is shown as a city with factories that made malt syrup with proteins. The central location of this novel is contrasted with itself multiple times to give a feeling that the various events have changed the feelings Billy has associated with this place though he finds it difficult to explain his anguish related to the most defining moment of his life. There are patterns that Vonnegut plans intricately in the novel. It is the stream of consciousness narrative always told in the past tense, to imply that linearity of events has no bearing on their implications or consequences. Similarly, the apparent lack of credibility to Billy’s philosophy of time, derived from trafalmadorians prowess of time viewing throws up the disenchantment with the existent system. Billy meets his parents, proposes to his lover, attends a conference, sneaks into a radio broadcast and in between all these seems to visit Dresden in various capacities and at various junctures. This seemingly convoluted journey of the protagonist is an attempt to capture the centrality of the defining moment. This is the most obvious pattern that can be deciphered from detailed reading of the novel. Though the novel abounds with suppositions and implausible logic, the one thing it is devoid of is visible anomalies. The perverse logic is consistent throughout an Vonnegut has taken special care for the stream of consciousness narrative to remain unhindered by any anomalies that can affect the flow of the novel or the effect it has on readers expecting a linear story writer. The uninhibited profanity and explicit description of un natural sex in a trafalmadorian cage, and the bristling pace of time travel with an obvious contempt to linearity are actually a scheme to prepare the reader to more readily accept the implicit message that Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. Chapter 9, pg. 198