Death And Futile Faith In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Joyful Death & Futile Faith "Being alive is a crock of shit" (Vonnegut). This seven word statement by Vonnegut's recurring character Kilgore Trout perfectly summarizes the message carried throughout Vonnegut's work. The upbringing of Vonnegut himself contributes to this lackluster view: he grew up amid the Depression. He watched his dad work himself to death as his mother courted suicide. He saw the massacre of innocents amid the firebombing of Dresden and became a prisoner of the Germans. Vonnegut is no stranger to the most primal of human feeling, of fear, of anger, even of what there are no words sufficient to describe. He experienced the paradoxical medley of death and jubilation that is war, and probably had his own Billy Pilgrim moment, a moment at which he felt impossible happiness, or perhaps the opposite; an unexplainable moment of utter despair. Despite of this, or perhaps, due to it, Vonnegut fostered the paradoxical ability to laugh at the most gruesome of things. Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five satirically portrays the structure and values upon …show more content…
In Slaughterhouse, a woman who prays is described as “silly”. The use of prayer as a Christian symbol contradicts the fatalism of Slaughterhouse. Vonnegut interjects his famous slogan “so it goes” each time he makes a reference to death in order to instill a sense of irrelevance. Vonnegut uses prayer as a symbol of Christianity to display the futility ph christian principles. Einstein’s theory of relativity is used by Vonnegut as the Tralfamadorian theory of space and time. The fact that a moment is structured in a certain way and cannot be changed contrasts with the Christian teachings about free will in which according to the behavior of somebody, it is possible to change the events of the future. The characteristics mentioned herein show how Vonnegut used the serenity prayer to reflect his own opinions about