Nature In Slaughterhouse Five

Superior Essays
“A life is something to be suffered or endured, not something one makes.” This convenient truth helps Billy Pilgrim come to terms with the passive nature of his existence. According to Billy because the Tralfamadorians have access to the 4th dimension. This means that they do the best with the allotted time they have been given by looking at moments the only want to look at. "There isn 't anything we can do about them, so we simply don 't look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments—like today at the zoo. Isn 't this a nice moment." Unlike the Tralfamadorians humans lack the ability to navigate this so called 4th dimension of time so they are doomed to suffer through life without just getting to look at the …show more content…
The narrator makes it very clear that man 's misdeeds are human, and it is of that nature to act accordingly. However Roland Weary is as close as they come. Roland Weary is the man Billy finds himself with behind enemy lines at The Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg. He is equipped for battle having every piece of equipment he had ever been issued.”(p.39) He talks a great deal to Billy about his fathers torture device collection, and likes to fantasize about how great of a soldier he is. The reality is he is a delusional, and reckless madman that shoots his gun crews machine gun which “made a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper...showing the germans exactly where it (the gun) was hidden.”(p.34) This results in the death of everyone in his crew but himself. He constantly saves Billy’s life, and constantly reminds him of that fact saying things like. “Saved your life again, you dumb bastard.”(p.34) He doesn 't do it out of compassion, but instead saves Billy to maintain his delusional fantasy about bringing Billy home and being regarded as a war hero along with the two other scouts that he finds himself with. In his over idealized fantasy he calls him and the two scouts “the three musketeers”(p.43) The scouts find him creepy, and eventually decide that Roland and Billy will only get them killed so they leave them behind. In a fit of rage Weary tries to shoot Billy just as some German troops discover them, and watch on in wonder, because they can figure out “why one American would try to murder another on so far from home.”(p.51) This situation is ironic because of the unnecessary violence in the midst of such monumental historical events taking place. Weary is as inexperienced a soldier as Billy, but he foolishly glorifies war, and thrives off of violence. He is the embodiment of everything thats wrong with the way society looks at war. Vonnegut is trying to say that those who glorify war are delusional

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Jennifer Baer Grade 9 Mrs. Villanova American Literature 1 On Courage, Cowardice, and Masculinity One of the first sights that are thought of on the subject of war is death. More specifically, death caused by other men. In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the thoughts of individual American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War are reflected upon, explicitly on what they did and did not execute during the Vietnam War. One of the main themes O’Brien includes is that, “Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to,” (O’Brien 21).…

    • 738 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When I think of horrific events that have happened in history I often think of the people who committed the crimes. Usually those people are awful savages who were emotionless. They kill innocent people for pleasure and treat them like animals while doing so. These attributes usually get pinned on said groups of people because we ourselves like to believe that humans are not capable of doing such horrific things. Christopher Browning shows us an example of a group of normal men who committed terrible crimes.…

    • 1001 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which no outlets in our quiet life”(15). This quote emphasizes that nature is essential to one’s existence. Nonetheless, making sacrifices for what you love is a true passion.…

    • 982 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many young children dream of being princesses or superheroes when they grow up and the rest of the world permits them to live in this fantasy world while they can. Inevitably, though, one day, the children will realize that the world is not the fairytale they once imagined it to be. A piece of their innocence and bliss slips away. The idea of loss of innocence has been popular in literature for ages. One of the best known novels in the world, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, follows the story of a young girl as she discovers that her town is not the picturesque place she once thought it was, but is instead filled with people quick to judge, especially when it comes to race.…

    • 894 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    As we see in the novel, from Billy’s family life to his experiences in the war, he is isolated and rejected by many of those around him. Therefore, through the element of science fiction in the novel, Vonnegut offers up an insight into the difficulties faced with those suffering from mental health issues with Billy’s creation of Tralfamadore, as noted, ‘Billy's trauma over the war is so severe that he must leave Earth (either in his mind or for real) to find comfort after all the violence he has seen’ (Shmoop Editorial Team,…

    • 2049 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Function: Often times, people that experience war struggle to conform back into the routines of society. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, protagonist Billy Pilgrim has difficulty dealing with the traumatic effects of the bombing of Dresden during WWII. To cope with his experiences, Billy develops this idea of Tralfamadore, a planet far more advanced than Earth.…

    • 475 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Shortly into the novel Slaughter House Five, Billy Pilgrim became “lost in time” and cannot control where he travels and whether he is in the past, present, or future. Billy saw anything from his own birth, various experiences from his life, and his death. This is because of the harsh things Billy had to go through as a young soldier, which would later affect how he lived life. These events traumatically changed Billy, for better or for worse, and his character. Kurt Vonnegut develops the character of Billy Pilgrim through his traveling to the planet…

    • 898 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the work INTO The Wild by Jon Krakauer Chris Mccandless is willing to go on a daring adventure to hike across the country to go up to alaska and live in the wilderness. I am going to prove that chris was a good person and valued a lot of stuff but he wanted to do a daring adventure and it got him into trouble In the end . By making three main points: chris’ value of nature, his value for what he had and, his caring personality.…

    • 553 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    1. In the second half of All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldiers return to the front after rumours of an attack. They are caught under heavy fire and their company of 150 men is reduced to only 32. Moreover, one of Paul’s friends, Haie Westhus, is killed after being stabbed during the attack.…

    • 1415 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Browning opens the book describing Major Wilhelm Trapp’s orders on the day of July thirteen, 1942, once Police Battalion 101 committed its 1st major killing within the Polish city of Jozefow. The next chapter then sets up the question that Browning can address: “How did a battalion of old reserve policemen notice themselves facing the task of shooting someone, 500 Jews within the Polish village of Jozefow within the summer of 1942?” . After this Brown sets up the next chapters, 2 through 6, that chart the creation of the Order Police within the aftermath of World War I, and its early tasks within the initial years of World War II, once its numbers grew as thousands of German men volunteered, some to avoid the draft and front-line service,…

    • 1347 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This shows how harmful the war was to the soldier’s psyche, where all feeling seemed to become more intense and cause them to act rashly and try and control their…

    • 798 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians believe in fate. The Tralfamadorians were the one that taught Billy to accept death. That he can’t change when he dies, he just does because of fate. This affects the story because if he did not believe in fate he would’ve not lived freely, and not cared for himself. He would’ve cared for himself more, since he would want to live longer.…

    • 1134 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In “The Man I Killed,” Tim O'Brien believed that the man he killed was an academic who exhibits signs of weakness as a person. I think he believes the man was an academic, because he did not look like the common soldier. For example, his fingernails were clean, he was young, and he looked scared. He did not seem like he knew what he was doing, or that he was focused on his tasks. He was carelessly walking, not ready to approach an enemy.…

    • 326 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In both Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Paul Horgan’s Mountain Standard Time there is a scene of violence. Both scenes feature hate crimes against individuals, where a group of people exert all their anger and frustration on a person. In Atonement, the scene features a soldier from the British Royal Air Force (RAF) being beaten to death by angered soldiers who experienced Dunkirk, they use the man as a punching bag, blaming him for their loss. In Mountain Standard Time, a little boy is riding his bike on a hot sunny day and reaches a mob of people who are forcing a man, after tying a rope around his neck, to kiss the American flag, accusing him of being a German spy. Both Incidents are similar because they show how humans love to hate and blame…

    • 1409 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Tralfamadorian Analysis

    • 115 Words
    • 1 Pages

    Now Billy can see the world in a human way and (though not completely) in a Tralfamadorian way too. This means it is not easy to tell if he ever exercises free will, because humans may say yes, while Tralfamadorians may say no. The Tralfamadorians would probably always deny that he could or would have ever used free will because it is non-existent. A human that understands their theory of time and why they think that free will is impossible, like Billy, can make his mind up about it and will maybe decide that he actually did use free will at some point in his life or maybe he will decide that he did…

    • 115 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays