“The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes—‘with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,’ says Billy Pilgrim.” I seem like a broken record saying this, but one of the most interesting concepts in Slaughterhouse five is that it often looks at time as one whole, not just one moment, but every moment, past, present, and future. These moments are permanent. They never have and never will change, because they just are. It’s mind boggling to think of things that way. The book plays into this and furthers the concept by making the reader ask questions like: “If everything is set in stone, do we really have free will?” “How can we find meaning in all of this mess?” ”DOES ANYTHING MATTER?!?!” and so on. The whole book is just watching the main character, Billy Pilgrim spiral into an existential crisis upon realizing how the universe works. Now, take a look at this extremely iconic minion gif (bear with me for a second). Pretty cool, right?Well, we view this gif the same as we do our everyday life. One frame at a time. Now, this is what it looks like, everything at once. Bit more chaotic now, isn’t it. And that’s only a short amount of time. Slaughterhouse-Five views the entire existence of the universe this way.
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"'Why me?' Slaughterhouse-Five is not just a book on war, death, memory, and time. It uses these incredibly controversial and convoluted themes to emphasize the existential. It wants us to ask "why?"
The more I read this book, the more I notice how it makes light of very dark themes like death in a way that almost makes you numb to their existence. "On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy, 'This ain’t bad. I can be comfortable anywhere.' 'You can?' said Billy. On the ninth day, the hobo died. So it goes"(Vonnegut 100). "So it goes." It's a phrase that anyone who has read any page of Slaughterhouse-Five will recognize. It is said after every death that appears in the novel. Its coldness lets us know that life goes on, every moment really just is. "The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes"(Vonnegut 107). Vonnegut uses "so it goes" for even the smallest of tragedies, ones that we'd never even acknowledge in our everyday lives. It is said so matter o' factly that it no longer means anything. They were alive in other parts of time, so why should it matter? The lack of emotion and certainty throughout Slaughterhouse-Five says a lot about what message it is trying to convey. War and death. It wants us to question these things. Can we really stop them? When do we know when to stop trying? I struggle to put into words the exact points that Vonnegut is trying to create, but the more I read, the more I understand what he is trying to say. https://positivewordsresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Serenity-1.jpg The Serenity Prayer is the only prayer that my parents taught me about when I was younger, which is why it stood out to me when it came up in Slaughterhouse-Five. Before I show the quote, I should probably give some context to what is currently going on in the story. The past two chapters in Slaughterhouse-Five have been focused on a man named Billy Pilgrim. One night in the year 1967, Billy was abducted by a group of tralfmadorians, an alien race that experiences all moments in time at once(see my first blog post, make sure to like and subscribe). Ever since the abduction, Billy seems to always be teleporting to different times in his life. "Billy blinked in 1958, traveled in time to 1961. It was New Year's Eve, and Billy was disgracefully drunk at a party where everybody was in optometry or married to an optometrist"(Vonnegut 58). These little time warps happen all the time. Billy no longer has control over his life. And now, here's the quote featuring the serenity prayer: "A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN, AND WISDOM ALWAYS TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE. Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future"(Vonnegut 77). A once profound quote that Billy held close to his heart gains another meaning. He quite literally has to spend the rest of eternity warping between predefined moments past, present, and future. One moment he's young, back in the war or college, the next he is at his own daughter's wedding, an old man. This further develops the themes of time and memory present in Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel yet again implies that time is an infinite fourth dimension that our brains can only process one moment at a time in the third. I decided to look more into the Serenity Prayer and found the full version: "God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time, Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, Taking, as Jesus did, This sinful world as it is, Not as I would have it, Trusting that You will make all things right, If I surrender to Your will, So that I may be reasonably happy in this life, And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen." The full version even further contradicts the points that Kurt Vonnegut has been making through the entire book. Billy cannot live one day or moment at a time, but all at once. Vonnegut does not want to take the "sinful world" for what it is, he wants to fight back against the terrors of war with an anti-war book. All of the plot lines and themes of Slaughterhouse-Five are made more clear through the Serenity Prayer, and that’s pretty funky fresh cool.🕺 Time is an extremely complicated subject. The more I think of it, the less I feel that I truly comprehend it. Slaughterhouse-Five, from the 40 pages that I've read so far, seems to have already covered some very large themes in relation to time. The most prominent of such themes in the novel is memory. "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all their names"(Vonnegut 1). Right off the bat, memory plays a huge role in Slaughterhouse Five. The first sentence,"All this happened, more or less," shows the true uncertainty of the author's recollection of the events that he writes about. The author goes even further in discussing his struggles with memory. His goal is to write a book that captures the utter horror of World War II and the tragic events that he lived through, yet he cannot find the words to describe what happened in an impactful way. Probably the most interesting concept that Slaughterhouse-Five brings up in the first few chapters, though, are the tralfmadorians. Tralfmadorians are an alien species that experience all time at once. The book delves into how limited we are as people, only being able to experience one moment at a time. We will only ever be in the now, never later, never then. (tralfmadorian photo via https://www.artstation.com/artwork/R3qmGy) “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever” (Vonnegut 34) This time-bending idea reminded me of a video that I had seen a few months ago. It depicts time as a three-dimensional object moving through a 2-dimensional world. As beings in a three-dimensional world, time would have to move through us in a 4-dimensional way. This is very similar to what I picture what a tralfmadorian sees. |