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.