“Fate: ‘what has been spoken,’ a power beyond men’s control that is held to determine what happens” (Webster’s Intermediate Dictionary 270).
Everywhere in the world, people attribute events to fate because of the belief that one has no control over one’s own life. People freely donate their lives to destiny because they believe life will happen according to a master plan, and they cannot help what happens to them. Therefore they do not try to change their life’s path. In literature, authors have often discussed this master plan in the medium of fate versus free will. Some authors support a fatalistic perspective, others promote free will. One of the writers who has mulled greatly upon this topic is Kurt Vonnegut.
Among the many devices used by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, to support the side of a world ruled entirely by fate are setting, structure, and allusion. One tool used in Slaughterhouse-Five to promote a fatalistic view is setting. Vonnegut often creates premonitions of fate by making connections between the environments of different time periods during the life of his main character, Billy Pilgrim. The author can create fear or happiness or an impending sense of doom by his description of the scenery and characters, such as the Tralfamadorians. By linking various conflicts and characters with their settings, Vonnegut manages to show that the participants in the story are controlled by their environment, not by their free will, as is the popular American belief. Numerous times in the text, Vonnegut does not express a particular emotion about a terrible event, conveying a feeling of fate to the reader precisely because of this apparent lack of feeling.
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Vonnegut often uses very descriptive imagery of the milieu to convey a feeling that the characters in the scene are ruled by an outside power that has arranged each creature much in the manner of players upon a chess board. Early in the novel, Billy recalls one of his experiences in the army. Billy has been traveling with two scouts and another teenager behind German lines for a few days. A group of German civilians find the Americans out in a quiet forest. The Germans discover the two scouts lying in a clump of bushes and Roland Weary trying to beat Billy Pilgrim to death. Billy, dumfounded, can think of nothing but the angelic face of the young German boy who helps him to his feet, not minding that these very people who rescued Billy have just murdered two men who are now lying, dying, on the ground not very far away.
Vonnegut writes: Three inoffensive bangs came from far away. They came from German rifles. The two scouts who had ditched Billy and Weary had just been shot. They had been lying in ambush for Germans. They had been discovered and shot from behind. Now they were dying in the snow, feeling nothing, turning the snow to the color of raspberry sherbet.
So it goes (Vonnegut 54).
One has a feeling of remorse for the scouts who are dying, but Vonnegut seems to cover up the terrible reality of death while still revealing some of the gory details in the star-crossed setting. One has a feeling that the scouts were destined to die, and the Germans to live, that the scouts were fated to be discovered while waiting to ambush the very people who kill them. Vonnegut uses the raspberry sherbet to express details in the setting, and “so it goes” to promote a feeling of predestined doom. One gathers this sentiment from the sadness of the setting and the way Vonnegut writes so nonchalantly, implying that the deaths were inevitable, that the scouts had to be discovered for Billy to be saved from Roland Weary and continue his pilgrimage through life, for if Billy Pilgrim had been killed, fate’s plan would have been disrupted. At another point in the story, Billy Pilgrim has arrived in a German prison camp.
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Slaughterhouse-Five Critics often suggest that Kurt Vonnegut's novels represent a man's desperate, yet, futile search for meaning in a senseless existence. Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, displays this theme. Kurt Vonnegut uses a narrator, which is different from the main character. He uses this technique for several reasons. Kurt Vonnegut introduces Slaughterhouse Five in the first person. ...
After the horror stories that one has heard about the terrible mistreatment of captives at prison camps during World War Two, one is surprised to find that Billy and the other Americans have survived the showers and are now hustled through gate after gate to their sleeping quarters. One has often heard of the creative services the Nazis invented for the showers, thus creating the reader’s surprise to find the “victims” in a German camp without unharmed beyond the beginnings of starvation. Vonnegut uses the setting to play upon the nerves of the reader by setting up a terrible death that the fatigued Americans are prepared to walk right into, no questions asked. Billy recalls: The Americans halted. They stood there quietly in the cold. The sheds they were among were outwardly like thousands of other sheds they had passed.
There was this difference, though: the sheds had tin chimneys, and out of the chimneys whirled constellations of sparks (Vonnegut 93).
There is a sense of unavoidable death in the description of the prisoner-of-war camp. This apprehension originates from the horrendous deaths of the Jewish people when they were burned in ovens and ground down to be used as bars of soap and buttons. If the Americans feel this or fear this harmful end, there is no sign; they seem resigned to their fate. If it is the fate of the soldiers to die, they will not fuss, but stand quietly waiting in the cold for fate to carry out their lot. It seems that the Americans feel, after the long journey they have just endured within cattle cars for days without end, fate might as well have her way, and there is no point in resisting what must ultimately happen to them.
Vonnegut uses this somewhat terrifying nighttime setting to convey a helplessness and resignation to fate. Later, Billy is on Tralfamadore with Montana Wildhack. The Tralfamadorians do not believe in free will because they can see both the past and the future and therefore do not understand that it is possible to change one’s future. Hence the Tralfamadorians follow the “lesson plan” that they see fate has set out for them. Occasionally, the Tralfamadorians change time, speeding it up and slowing it down as suits them. Montana and Billy have adjusted to the variations, and in time the Tralfamadorian clock is no longer a common topic of conversation, a terse statement sufficing to explain what is happening.
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Montana remarks simply, “‘They’re playing with the clocks again,’ said Montana, rising, preparing to put the baby into its crib. She meant that their keepers were making the electric clocks in the dome go fast, then slow, then fast again” (Vonnegut 208).
Miss Wildhack seems resigned to her fate on Tralfamadore, that the clocks will be changed, and she may not understand what is happening. The domes in this setting connect one’s mind to the great blue sky of the earth, and the earthly and Tralfamadorian shared belief in fate. Therefore, this quote links both Tralfamadore and the Earth through a common description of setting. Another literary device used by Kurt Vonnegut displaying a fatalistic perspective is structure.
Many times throughout the novel, the author uses a shifty and irregular structure, floating between events in the story of Billy Pilgrim’s life. This structure almost implies that Vonnegut has no control over the order of the text and therefore no control over life itself, even if only on paper. Vonnegut tells how the story ends before it begins, creating the destiny of the story before the reader has even commenced to make any conclusions about the content. Vonnegut writes: It begins like this: Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet? (Vonnegut 22).
With the structure of this introduction, Vonnegut is creating the destiny of his book.
The format of Slaughterhouse-Five makes relations form in one’s mind with the Tralfamadorian novels, and from the Tralfamadorian novels, one’s mind is connected again with fate because of the strong Tralfamadorian belief in fate. Billy tried to read a Tralfamadorian novel once, then commented on its structure, how it was organized, or disorganized, in a rather patternless way. An alien ….
