No One Is Listening

“[She] told the receptionist that Billy was evidently going crazy.” Even his daughter asked, “Father, Father-what are we going to do with you?”(p. 29)

            They rendered him crazy, with his babble about the Tralfamadorians and his time traveling. Yet, Billy wasn’t crazy at all he was simply stating where he had been and what he had learned. Time and time again Billy was shot down for simply explaining his viewpoint. People had stopped listening to what he was saying, and just nodded their heads at all his nonsense. Yet, in Billy’s eyes he simply preached what he knew.

            Its like sitting in math class trying to explain a perfectly simple concept, however your way of understanding varies from the traditional or accepted ways, therefore making you wrong. Yet, you’re positively sure that what you say is correct. In fact, you are right, just that your method of explaining is slightly different. Billy Pilgrim goes through much the same process. Even those that have his best interests at heart don’t believe he is being rational.

            What occurs is that Billy seems to be standing in a sound proof room. He talks and his lips move and people can see that, he makes faces and people watch them, yet when he speaks no one hears him.

            Somehow Billy maintains his patience through all the disbelief, yet evidently he wishes someone would at least attempt to listen.

Life In All Its Pointlessness

Three years after the war Billy Pilgrim finds himself in the nonviolent mental patients ward of a veteran’s hospital. Both him and his hospital roommate, Eliot Rosewater, have lost their will to live. They are both war survivors, and theoretically this should fuel their will to live. Witnessing inhumane slaughter and senseless fighting should make them feel lucky to still be alive. Yet in truth, this is the very reason that has caused them to lose all appreciation of life. The atrocities they experienced first-hand, sadly transformed their value of life, into a limp, meaningless pulp. Eliot Rosewater expresses these dark feelings when he tells a psychologist, “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”(101) However, Eliot and Billy aren’t the only ones who address life as futile and empty. When referring to Billy Pilgrim’s morphine state of oblivion, the head Englishman at the war prison camp says, “How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”(105)

Although, all three of these individuals share their previous war experiences, they aren’t alone in their aversion toward living. In the book Burned by Ellen Hopkins, a series of unfortunate events leads a young girl to hate being alive. Her boyfriend who she claims to be the love of her life is killed in a fatal car crash, her father on alcoholic abuses her mother and siblings, and she has felt repressed all her life. All these events accumulate and result in an explosion that drives her to address life as a bleak, waste of time and energy.  Traumatizing events and experiences can cause this sense of desperation and genuine disinterest. However, there is a difference between wanting to die, and simply not wanting to live. When you want death you’re fueled by anger and remorse, yet when you don’t want to live the circumstances are very different. What usually occurs is that you have reached a point where the concept of living seems pitiful and futile. This state of emptiness more often then not is triggered by experiencing events that reveal the natural cruelty that humans poses, which is true in each of the cases displayed above. Nonetheless, this feeling of uselessness commonly experienced when people no longer long to live, is detrimental and woeful for any individual. 

Free Will?

Billy Pilgrim accuses his Tralfamadorian captor of being a non-believer in free will. Yet, the Tralfamadorian simply replies “I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”

This free will we frivolously put our faith in, entitles us to the power of independent action and choice, but what if it’s just an illusion? What if our paths have already been meticulously carved out for us? Making us meek pawns at the exposure of the universe.

Maybe, Billy Pilgrim was always destined to become a successful optometrist, to suffer as a war prisoner, become unstuck in time, and visit the Tralfamadorian planet. Possibly, the script to his life was pre-written and he was simply an actor who preformed the play.

Which of course would also theoretically mean that as I sit here and punch out these very words on my computer keyboard, my life has already been mapped out. My dreams might come true, just as easily as they might not. However, this might not be a decision for me to make. In fact, it’s likely that I´m utterly powerless in the matter, and subjected to go wherever this predestined life may lead me.

I shudder to think this, that anything I do, say or contemplate…might not have any effect on my life whatsoever. Just pondering this possibility makes me feel drained and powerless. Like, the sickening feeling of getting the wind knocked out of you, causing your eyes to bulge in disbelief and your breath to come out in pathetic little gasps. Although I can’t neglect the possibility of free will being a disappointing fraud, I honestly hope that it does exist and that I CAN liberally set out to write my own story.

A Prisoner

The passages of chapter three are sprinkled with the phrase "so it goes". It demonstrates Billy Pilgrim's passive attitude. How he knows that these occurrences are out of his control, much like the quote in his optometry office says. "GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE..." The chapter skips around from moments he was captive in the war to moments that he was working as a successful optometrist with a comfortable living style. We also realize that the narrator  was also a prisoner of war, and actually crossed paths with Billy Pilgrim. This chapter is relatively grim, as he describes the troubles and pain of being a prisoner of war. 

         Ironically, when we are transported to the moments after the war, where he is a working optometrist, he also seems to be a prisoner. A prisoner of his own fate, unable to change any aspect of it. He addresses everything with a sense of disinterest and genuine carelessness. Although, he mentions his wealth and success, neither seems to bring him happiness. He also seems lonely and disconected from his surroundings. On the contrary, when he's under the control of the Germans, Billy describes things as "stingingly exciting" and the narrator says he "had smiles for them all". Although without doubt Billy was a suffering prisoner of War, he seems more lively and awake in this time. He might not have been happy per say, but he seems more intuitive then in later years. I feel sympathy for Billy Pilgrim, his state is truly endearing. It reminds me of those people who suffer from depression. A given event has caused them to become uninterested, good fortune may befall them, yet they hardly take note. They drift through life without much thought or emotion. Billy Pilgrim seems equally monotone and I feel for him. The war seems to have disconnected him from his surroundings, in much the same way as the time traveling has. I worry for him and hope that other moments in his life are more upbeat and joyous. 

Billy Pilgrim, Deployed

This chapter revolves around Billy Pilgrim, a man who claims to have come unstuck in time. This causes him to pay random visits to different moments in his life with no set pattern or order of any sort. When asked, Billy says he began this traveling while fighting in World War Two. He had just begun college when he was deployed to the fighting front. Young and inexperienced he was simply thrust into the war. Although, he wasn’t exactly a soldier he found himself utterly lost in the midst of all the violence. As a result he joined three, lost American soldiers attempting to find their way back to safety. However, unequipped, young, naïve, and unprepared Billy struggles to keep up. In no time, the two most experienced soldiers desert the remaining two, Billy and Weary. Enraged, Weary blames Billy and proceeds to punch the living daily lights out of him. Weary pauses mid-kick because a curious German audience has gathered and on that note the chapter ends, leaving the reader in suspense.

This excerpt on the war is similar to the movie Full Metal Jacket. This movie is based on the Vietnam War, where young 19-year old men have been drafted into a brutal war. Wide-eyed and undertrained the inexperienced soldiers find themselves lost and disoriented, much in the same way that Billy finds himself. They trudged along because they had no other choice, yet unmotivated and clueless, they found it hard to survive. Billy Pilgrim has no desire to participate in the war and multiple times expresses his wish to simply die or as he puts it, “evaporate”. Evidently, war is no place for young men like Billy who have entire lives ahead of them, yet because of the conflict face imminent fear and possible death. 

Where To Start?

What is more important? To voice every detail of an event, or to capture its essence and teach based on that, maybe both, maybe neither. The difficult part is figuring out how to go about either choice.

The narrator in Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is facing exactly this. He fought in the Second World War and planned to write about the destruction in Dresden. However, this is easier said than done. Memories seem to elude him and although he’s attempted to retell the event countless times, he never seems to fully accomplish it. Yet here he is, once again attempting the seemingly impossible and he begins with a visit to an old war friend Bernard V. O’Hare. Afterward he decides to commence his story at the most obvious beginning, looking retrospectively on the dreadful that once was. Even though like Lot’s wife in the Gideon Bible, he’s been warned about what looking back entitles, he does it anyway, and at this point begins his story.

The narrator’s uncertainty is very relatable. I’ve experienced this hesitant state when apologize for my actions. I’m aware that I need to say I’m sorry, that even want to say it, but I never know where to start or how to exactly do it. Many times I find myself going about it in circles and abandoning ship right before I accomplish the goal, just to start again at the beginning. In the end I usually get it done, but the journey there is a long struggle, in the same way that it has been for the book’s narrator. 

Over In The Blink Of An Eye

Every moment is fleeting, with the sand clock silently ticking off the passing time, what now seems so sweet and meaningful, will soon turn to ashes. Our author, John Koethe, describes his life as a bittersweet delusion. As the title implies, he has “The Perfect Life”, yet old age seems to be creeping awfully near. He sees youth as a time, where the simple indulgences in life bring happiness. Yet, once the prior energy possessed in childhood leaves, the realization of life’s emptiness and cruelness befalls him. He continues by saying that the human dies and with him parish all that he once knew. Concluding that life is just another empty, fleeting occurrence that with the soft blow of the wind will be carried away into oblivion.

Although I may be to young to fully comprehend what it means to lose interest in the very essence of life, at the moment I feel strong opposition to his claims.  Life is fleeting and in the blink of an eye it ends, yet every moment is memorable and enjoyable. Childhood brings a sense of innocence and purity, which enables the youth to observe everything wide eyed and happily. Then as one matures, problems become more challenging and the world seems to take a more menacing form. Yet, the older human has more wisdom and experience, therefore is also more prepared for the perils they may face in life. With the right mindset, they too can find beauty in everyday life, no matter how frivolously perfect it may appear. As to Koethe’s last point of human death, I agree that it washes away much of what was accomplished in that life, yet the memories can live on in other generations. After all, if the fleeting moment is perfect and full of contentment, why does the future or even the ending, matter at all?