Time

Vonnegut interestingly manipulates the memory of the human mind. In Slaughterhouse 5 he uses the fluidity of memory to show how it is not linear but more flexible than that. He constantly plays with time to accentuate how it is in no order and is often repeated, it is cyclical and moving. He uses phrases like “So it goes” to show how time marches on, but the expansive use of it showing how it marches again and again with the same ending; death. In chapter four Vonnegut also plays with the chronical order in which things happen in a different order and it changes the significance of them. Time is important and how you remember it is as well. Once someone notices the pattern that life is repeating itself, it is not something you are fated to. The order of events does matter. 

The prime example of how the order of events happens is in sibling rivalries. My growing up with three sisters has tutored me in the arts of cause and effect, and then the effect when the orders are mixed. If my sister hit me first and I yell to my mom to intervene with some sort of capital punishment for the insult my sister is quick to rebut that I hit her first. She then tells this long tale of how five days ago I tripped her at the mall. The story is not even one I remember, and would never admit to remembering, but she remembers it clearly down to what I was wearing. I on the other hand simply remember I bought a cute red top that day. Her memory of the day was much different from anything I could recall from that fateful day that led to her revenge. 

She took her retribution from a memory that she thought completely justified the action and my mom simply rolls her eyes and tells us to get along or some benign unfulfilled threat will be enacted. But second sister helpfully chimes in that she was the one that tripped my other sister and that it happened after we were even at the mall. All three of us have such clear difference in the fluidity of what happened, yet it all happened at the same time. At one point we probably all have tripped each other and hit one another. The time isn’t important and it may seem that the sequence of events is important, yet we all have such different accounts of the chain of events. 

The order of time does matter but the fallacy of the human brain nullifies the recording of the events and why they happened. The only thing that can be accounted for is the result at that exact moment, for example the fact that I had just been smacked.  And that memory will quickly fade and become a subjective account of what occurred. The phrase “So it goes” (Vonnegut pg 19). Is used after the death of Lot’s wife. It becomes an expression used after many of the deaths of characters. It seems to be an accepted phrase to move on in the story. That is all that is written after someone’s death, a marking and a movement on. A sign of giving up under the feet of the marching of time. Not only is it used in Billy’s story but it first comes from Vonnegut’s direct interaction with his audience, making it part of the fantasy and story but also real life. 

The Tralfamadorians, the aliens that abduct Billy, teach him that time is always going in one direction and there is no changing it. Every action will always lead to the same conclusion. Vonnegut is contradicting their beliefs. Billy sees a program on his television but he sees it in reverse. Instead of it being about the war, he sees it backwards and the same events occur simply in a different order. “Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed (Vonnegut pg 64-65). And unlike the champange he popped before viewing the movie and finding it flat life simply cannot be willed away with ‘so it goes’. There is a resolution and way to change the end result. 

Vonnegut was not talking about defeating death in the literal sense, but defeating the senseless loss of it. In wars and conflict over events that have been caused by some unseen domino that no one longer remembers. Conflicts that wage over tensions that were before the soldiers great- grandparents were born. The soldiers who risk and lose their lives in the complete prideful chaos.

Um...

Slaughterhouse-Five is filled with phrases that, instead of feeling redundant, gain meaning as they are repeated. The phrases “So it goes” and “Um” are the most notable of these. This tactic marks important points that Vonnegut is trying to make, but the points are not always very obvious. The use of these phrases invites the reader to attempt to explain why they are repeated so many times and what Vonnegut’s aims is in using them. Because of this, the reader is allowed to see what he or she wants to see.

The most ubiquitous of these is “so it goes,” which is stated every time a person’s death is mentioned. No matter the circumstances of the death, this phrase emphasizes the futility of resistance and echoes the Tralfamadorian view that free will is an illusion. Whether the death is peaceful and comes in old age or is the result of brutal violence, there is no avoiding it. The phrase offers an unbiased explanation of death. It does not try to rationalize death or attach meaning to it. Instead, it poses is as unavoidable and routine. This is, technically, a true argument. It is troubling, however, when “so it goes” refers to a case of inexcusable violence or brutality. Edgar Derby’s execution, for example, comes as a punishment for stealing a teapot after surviving the bombing of Dresden. His death is senseless and tragic, but is still met with the phrase. In a way, this act is excused because this is how things were going to happen any way. Derby was going to die by execution regardless of human action and the executioners are pardoned for their brutality in the name of fate.

“Um” is Billy Pilgrim’s response to this Tralfamadorian logic. In a conversation with a Tralfamadorian, Billy Pilgrim is told that avoiding war is futile, just like avoiding death is. War is merely the way of the world and there is nothing to be done to stop it. In an attempt to comfort Pilgrim, the Tralfamadorian says, “’That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.’ ‘Um,’ said Billy Pilgrim” (Vonnegut 117).  In the face of Tralfamadorian passive acceptance of even the ugliest parts of life, Billy Pilgrim does not seem satisfied. Although “um” is a remarkably non-committal response, it does signal at least a questioning of what the Tralfamadorian has said. If “so it goes” represents the idea that war is an unavoidable and natural aspect of human life, then “um” represents the hope that maybe things can change. “Um,” in its quiet disapproval, states that there is a desire to not live and relive the horrors of war and demands that people be held accountable for their own brutality.

As these two phrases are repeated throughout the book, their opposition, originally unclear, becomes starker. Although it can be comforting to accept an inevitability in both death and war, the removal of free will and therefore personal responsibility is worrisome to say the least. In the face of tragedy, it is sometimes easier to turn to ideologies like “so it goes,” like “everything happens for a reason.” Some things are too terrible to rationalize or understand, but there is certainly danger in defaulting to a position of passivity. In the case of Edgar Derby, fate is not to blame. This injustice can be attributed only to the fault of the men involved. This is not how things should simply “go.” Instead, such brutality should make us stop and say “um…”

A Duty-Dance with Death

     Death isn’t altogether uncommon in literature, but never before have I found it so prominent as it is in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Not only is the novel riddled with death, but each one is punctuated with the phrase “so it goes,” emphasizing death’s presence again and again. For Vonnegut, the use of this phrase creates a means of casting off the death as if it is not such a big deal. In fact, the narrator, Billy Pilgrim, as presented in the midst of war, is practically dead. Billy has nothing much to live for and is constantly cast from event to event, much like Candide in Voltaire’s text, not really having much agency in his life, being, for all intents and purposes, dead.

            Reflecting upon Billy Pilgrim’s experiences during this time, I can’t help but be reminded of a quote from Shawshank Redemption. When talking about the hopelessness of being stuck in prison, Tim Robbins’ character says that he has to “get busy living or get busy dying,” determining that he’s either going to maintain the hope for a better life, getting out of prison, or resolve to stay within this life of despair and submitting to his prison life. Billy has to make this same decision, whether he is going to submit to this life in the war or keep any sense of hope for the future.

            The narrator in Slaughterhouse-Five follows the themes of postmodern literature, though, and emphasizes this idea of “get[ting] busy dying.” Death becomes normal, almost expected in the novel, desensitizing the reader to its horrors. For people in the wake of WWII, the entire world was turned upside down and filled with destruction and chaos they were not accustomed to. Many people, especially those who had gone to war, did not know how to approach life anymore and became very detached and “dead” to the world. Death became just another part of life and its felt strongly throughout Vonnegut’s novel through the attitude of the narrator as well as Billy Pilgrim’s tale.   

            Thankfully, Billy Pilgrim turns his life around slightly after encountering the Tralfamadorians. After he adopts their views on time and events, he starts “get[ting] busy living,” by writing his book and taking his life into his own hands (even if his daughter isn’t the biggest fan). Even while taking this hold on his own life, Billy is accepting the immanence of death, knowing that death, too, will be just another “moment” as the Tralfamadorians referred to it, and nothing more.
            Although this may seem like a potential resolution to the uncomfortably prominent and horrifying presence of death in the novel and in life itself, I struggle to see it as such. Yes, we all die eventually, and yes, it is a natural part of life, but isn’t there a sort of reverence meant to be had for it? Is death not honorable at times? Is it not tragic? Vonnegut’s stance on death, given the time he was writing in, makes complete sense, but I can’t entirely jump on board. Death, for me, and I’m sure for most of mankind, is a hard topic to deal with and “living” while you can, is not entirely enough to make death easier to swallow and I don’t think that it ever should be. We all have our own "duty-dance with death" and there is no avoiding it, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should accept it as an everyday dance which isn't a significant event. As Elie Wiesel put it, “The opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

Humans aren't Tralfamadorians - "So it goes" won't go

“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.” –“Eliot Rosewater” in Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

So it goes, Candide’s sense of optimism, cest la vie – there are dozens of phrases, words, and ideas meant to ease one’s mind about the events unfolding around us. In Voltaire’s Candide, I and many others in my class questioned the morality of accepting the hardships in life as “the best possible event” – would it make us passive bystanders to cruelty? Fate becomes a central theme to Vonnegut’s highly acclaimed anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse Five. However, instead of satirizing the belief of an inevitability to our lives (as Voltaire did), Vonnegut pokes and prods at the concept of free will, time, and fate.

According to the Tralfamadorians (aliens who abducted Billy Pilgrim), “only on Earth is there any talk of free will” (Vonnegut, 86).  Because they can see the fourth dimension of time, Tralfamadorians view time as static as the Rocky Mountains. Every moment will go on continuously and simultaneously. No one is dead. Instead, one may live forever in the ever present past. One will live despite death. “So it goes.” The Tralfamadorians find comfort in this saying as they acknowledge the illusion of death within the confines of the human understanding of time. Additionally, free will is a foreign concept, because of this understanding of time. If all moments, past, present, and future, exist at the same time, then one is powerless to change any events. “So it goes.”

The Tralfamadorians may find comfort in this saying, but how can that be applied to humanity? The quote at the beginning of this post would indicate that Rosewater would scorn the Tralfamadorians – saying they were another form of psychiatrist coming up with a “wonderful new lie” so people would “want to go on living.” There is a description of Rosewater’s bedside table – “a still life [of] two pills, an ashtray with three…cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes” (Vonnegut, 101). I find that this would be the perfectly human understanding of the Tralfamadorians view of time. A still life that is dead, alive in the past and not the present where we live, so our grief is valid.

To be honest, I’m not sure where I am going with this. Every one of us has felt death’s affect in our lives. A grandparent, a friend taken too early, a pet, etc. However, as this is an anti-war novel, it only seems fitting to talk about my brother’s volunteer service, in which he spent time with residents at the senior center. The elderly man he visited two hours twice a week was a Vietnam veteran named Samuel Mitchell. My brother once told me about a war-story Samuel shared. It was about Samuel and a young man he called his best friend. The best friend’s name was Charlie Winters. One day, their regiment was ambushed, but no one was killed. However, Samuel was among the casualties – his right leg blown completely off. He was sent back out of the field, and Charlie had to stay. Later on, Samuel got a notice that Charlie was killed in combat.

Samuel seemed hollow, so my brother tried to comfort him. My brother said at least Charlie’s memory lived on with Samuel. My brother said that maybe that’s what God intended. Maybe Charlie knew he had to be Samuel’s best friend, so Samuel wouldn’t have been the one who died. My brother knew Samuel was a religious man. Samuel, though, shook his head.

“Maybe God had a plan. Maybe fate said I was supposed to live. Maybe Charlie’s screamin’ at me from heaven for mournin’ him – for mournin’ my lost leg. …But I was still forced to go through life without my best friend.”

 Maybe we can say “so it goes,” but mourning doesn’t work that way. We don’t see the fourth dimension like the Tralfamadorians. We are humans. We face massacres in our present and try to keep them from happening again in our future. We fight for the free will to “express contempt for people who think we need massacre machinery” (Vonnegut, 19). We are humans. We mourn and grieve and cry. We tell Fate what we think should have happened.  

So it goes. And so on.

Bleak history is made darkly comedic in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  Through his perpetual use of understatement, Vonnegut hilariously depicts the fault of human decision.  The adventures of protagonist Billy Pilgrim make little to no sense as he travels back in history, into the future, and even through an alternate universe.  The confusing reality of BIlly Pilgrim combined with the narrator’s flat affect are uncomfortable and somewhat disconcerting for the reader.  Yet it is the alternating feelings of stability and discomfort that allow the reader to better understand the rather unsettling realities of the modern world. 

The story of Billy Pilgrim is told by an omniscient narrator, one who often finishes his tales with the phrase “so it goes”.  Whether the stories portray the problems of death, triumph, or mystical fantasy, “so it goes” is almost always the resolution.  This bleak understatement is unsettling.  The narrator is telling us that no matter what happens, we are only a small speck on the grand scale of human history.  This feeling of worthlessness, however, is intentional.  The disorientation that the reader experiences as Billy traverses between the worlds of his past, present, and future, makes the reader question the ultimate purpose of the novel.  But this “what’s the point?” mentality is exactly what Vonnegut wants from us.  If we question Billy’s reality, we must in turn question our own.    

Perhaps the most bizarre faction of the novel, Billy’s adventures with the Tralfamadorians disorient the reader completely.  One minute he’s sleeping next to his wife, and the next he’s trapped in an amber sediment.  By observing his own world from the viewpoint of these aliens, Billy is offered a new perspective.  “All time is all time”, a Tralfamadorian explains, “It does not change.  It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations.  It simply is” (86).  This idea of stagnation, of things never changing, seems foreign to Billy, and to us as readers.  As humans we consider ourselves agents of change and progress; but from an outsider’s perspective, we simply occupy a world where history continually repeats itself.  The Tralfamadorian’s opinion blends perfectly with the narrator’s apathetic “so it goes” attitude.  As readers however, we must realize that Billy’s journey with the Tralfamadorians mimics ours with Vonnegut’s.  In reading Slaughterhouse Five, we experience a similar disorientation to Billy, which asks us to contemplate the realities that have been placed in front of us.  Vonnegut wants us to question the concepts of war, violence, and destruction.  He wants us to see that the way in which we solve our problems might not be the best, and that there is, somewhere out there, a differing perspective from our own.  The consequence of not discovering these perspectives is becoming victim to the “so it goes” mentality, of becoming another worthless being incapable of change.   

Though I don’t necessarily equate Jesuit education with dark humor, I find Vonnegut’s message strangely similar to that of St. Ignatius.  The purpose of Vonnegut’s novel, as well as a Jesuit education, is change.  Through learning about the world around us, by shedding previously held ideals, by getting in touch with the elusive “girtty reality” that Kolvenbach and many other Jesuits so often refer to, we can be changed for the better.  It is only by removing ourselves from the comfort of our own reality (getting kidnapped by aliens or otherwise) that we can truly come to learn and grow from experience.  

Without a doubt, I belong in the city.  I like being surrounded by action and excitement.  I like doing things, keeping busy.  So not surprisingly, when I learned that I’d be traveling to Vanceburg, Kentucky for my spring break outreach trip two years ago, I was less than thrilled.  When we arrived on the farm (yes, farm), there was nothing but long valleys and far off woods in sight.  When we travelled “downtown” the small streets were cluttered with boarded up buildings and the occasional hardware store.  Nothing about this place was familiar to me; nothing was comfortable.  But as I was encouraged by my leader to “lean into discomfort”, I began to slowly open myself up to my new surroundings.  Cleaning out an abandoned school made me think of my own experience with education.  Laying down floorboards in a newly constructed house allowed me to appreciate the great comforts of my own home.  And helping construct a new rehabilitation center for those experiencing addiction, made me feel more closely connected with members of my own family who have experienced it as well.  This idea of “leaning into discomfort”, of slowly disorienting myself, actually enhanced my learning experience, and offered a new perspective of my own life.  In allowing myself to be removed from the comfort of my own reality, I became an agent of change, unwilling to accept “so it goes” as an explanation or solution.  

Beauty in Humanity

I found Vonnegut’s Slaughter House-Five to be centered around powerful, emotional moments that help the reader understand what it means to be a human being. Vonnegut has an uncanny ability to portray these exquisite moments in words, where the reader can not help but to be in that moment. 

Billy’s transport on the train as a POW was on of the more gruesome and cruel experiences Billy had in Germany. Billy describes the train after days traveling where, “In went water and loaves of black bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language” (70). This demonstrates how these men are not seen as individual people, no longer possessing all of the traits individuals have. These men are now seen as single units where their opinions, needs, wants, and desires are completely irrelevant. Keep in mind, that this is how the guards see the train cars; the view from inside the train cars could not be any more different. 

In the very next paragraph, Billy describes life inside the train car, in comparison to how they are seen from the outside. “Human beings in there were excreting into steel helmets which were passed to the people at the ventilators, who dumped them. Billy was a dumper. The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.” (70). The first thing to notice in this passage is the use of ‘human beings’. Vonnegut uses this term three times within four sentences, emphasizing that these men are still human, still in need of care an attention, still part of this world. Here the reader sees the drastic difference between what these prisoners are perceived as (train-car organisms), and what they truly are(human beings). 

I would be hard pressed to find a more powerful moment in this novel. In a scene where men are literally dying from disease, starvation and freezing to death, we see these men treating one another with respect, kindness, dignity and most importantly, equality. These men understand that they are all in the same position, essentially fighting for one another’s lives as well as their own. Could this portrayal of fitly, sickly, disgusting dying men be any more beautiful? Nothing could be more relevant to these men than one another. 

I think that these moments of beauty in humanity are one of the reasons Loyola has such a strong commitment to service in the community. When you are exposed to situations and human interaction that is so selfless and kind, it can force one to think about your role in the community and the potential influence you could have on someone. 

During my time at Tunbridge so far, I have been spending time with third and fourth graders playing games in an after school program. Occasionally I will see a student that does not want to participate in the given activity. I have made a point to attempt to include these children periodically, and have had great success. I have found it very rewarding to recruit a child that may not have decided on their own to come and join the group playing. But, with my encouragement and assurance that it will be fun, most children, soon decide to join the group and participate. Furthermore, it is even more touching when the student decides to participate, and all of the other children welcome him/her with enthusiasm and excitement, yelling out, “She/He is on MY team!!!” Although this moment of including a child in a group activity may not be as significant as the kindness on Billy’s train car, I believe that these moments of beauty in human interaction is one way Loyola students are able to step outside the classroom and connect real world experience to a powerful moment in a novel. 

Measures of Worth

Measures of Worth

El Dorado challenges Candide’s perception of priorities and of what constitutes value.. The juxtaposition between Candide’s perception of jewels and the schoolmaster’s perception of jewels emphasizes how exploring other countries is helpful to understanding one’s own beliefs. The narrator states, “Our travelers from the other world amused themselves by looking on. The quoits were large round pieces, yellow, red, and green, which cast a singular luster” (41). Since the narrative focuses on Candide, every other place should be considered the “other.” However, the use of the world “other” is relative to El Dorado being the “norm.” This particular description signifies that “otherness” is relative to what one is familiar with; this way of thinking does not, however, allow one to see the world without prejudice.

In contrast to Candide and Cacambo’s viewpoint, “the schoolmaster, smiling, flung [the quoits] upon the ground; then, looking at Candide with a good deal of surprise, went about his business” (41). The action of “[flinging the quoits] upon the ground” demonstrates indifference toward the jewels. From the previous extracted quotation, Candide and Cacambo are “amused” with the objects; the schoolmaster is “surprised” at the visitors. While “amused” and “surprised” are charged with a similar energy, the objects that evoke these emotions differ which signifies the disproportionate weight these two parties place upon jewels. In comparing and contrasting how the two systems differ- that of El Dorado and that of Westphalia, Candide experiences a place that is able to sustain itself without the application of familiar structures and institutions, like prisons, governments, etc. This experience signifies that there is no singular, proper, approach to creating a foundation for a nation. The approach that fuel independent gain through material goods have a direct correlation with war and violence.