Choices Defined by Slaughter-House Five
Slaughter-House Five or The Children’s Crusade is a novel written in the “Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore” by Kurt Vonnegut. It does a wonderful job, not only of providing, but envisioning for you, the answer to the question “How much control do we have over our own lives?”. Before and after reading this book, I have concluded that the answer to the previous question is “none”. Humans have no control over their life.
Slaughter–House Five follows the main character, Billy Pilgrim, through his life from his perspective. Unlike you and me, he has become “unstuck in time”, so he experiences life totally differently. One moment he is being treated for a swollen thumb as a child, the next moment he is being treated like a vegetable in a hospital as an adult. Moving around constantly like this lets you realize how flawed a human’s view of life is. Billy Pilgrim, knowing this, lives out his life, along for the ride.
In chronological order, it seems, Billy Pilgrim is first born. He continues to live and learn, go to school, as any normal boy would. He grows up to get married to a rich lady and become an optometrist. Around this time he is kidnapped by a flying saucer navigated by fourth-dimensional aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. Without anyone noticing, he stays on Tralfamadore for 10 years and returns promptly to Earth seconds after he was kidnapped. In a plane crash, he is the only one that survives, his wife dies on the way to meet him, so it goes. When WWI starts, he gets involved and eventually became a prisoner of war, only to witness the firebombing of Dresden, where 135,000 people where killed, so it goes. He is released, and lives, only to be cared for by his daughter. With a bad back, he escapes his house to tell his fans about the nature of time. Moments later he is shot by a sniper, an old enemy from the war, so it goes. This is Billy’s life, but not as he sees it. Billy’s life as he sees it is too complicated to write in order.
The Essay on The Stroke Life Mother House
The Stroke Every second, of every day, something happens to someone in the world. Sometimes it is for the best, and sometimes it is not. I truly believed that the bad only happened to those who deserved it. The human population lives in their safe little world believing that nothing bad will happen to them. Or at least this is what I believed. Unfortunately, as the saying goes "shit happens." On ...
Billy must have been confused when he first became unstuck in time, but when he was kidnapped years later, time was explained to him by the Tralfamadorians. I imagine they said something like this:
“Listen here, Billy. Time as you see it is correct. Well, at least, it is closer to correct than what most humans see. Before you became unstuck in time, we imagine that you must have seen things fall into place as if they were being determined by the second. Sadly, the rest of the inhabitants of Earth see their life like this. Time is an illusion. Really, everything has already happened. Whatever you see is just a bunch of moments. One moment, everything is at one state. Another moment, everything is at another state. So in a sense, everyone that will ever be alive is immortal. They are all immortal in their own times.”
If the book said this, I would have quoted it as a reference, but it didn’t, so this is only what I guess that Tralfamadorians told Billy.
In conclusion, when you look at life the way Tralfamadorians look at it, you can see why Humans have no control over their life. As I said, everything is already laid in stone, we have no choices and never will unless we could somehow move enough mass into one space and send a human into some higher dimension. This is not likely to happen. In this case, I am just going to feel satisfied like I should when I think I did a good job, and pretend to make choices, and have fun. However, just because I can’t change anything doesn’t mean that I can’t pretend like I can change everything. After all this anyway, I am just along for the ride.