Renegotiating Ethics in Literature - Book Report/Review Example

Slaughterhouse-five Kurt Vonnegut was a brilliant and this can be ascertained by the fact that his book slaughterhouse-five was ranked as the eighteenth best English written novel of the twentieth century in regards to Modern Library. Slaughterhouse-five is generally referred to as Kurt’s most popular and influential work. This novel can be described as being satirical and it is about a soldier by the name Billy Pilgrim and his experiences throughout world war two and the journeys he undertook through time. The book is also known under the title, the children’s crusade: a duty dance with death. Through reading i could see that Billy Pilgrim is an ill-trained American soldier, he is disoriented and fatalistic. Despite the fact that he is a soldier, he does not like wars. (Vonnegut, 2001) During the Battle of the Bulge Billy is captured by the Germans. He and his fellow prisoners are taken to Dresden and put in a slaughterhouse that is unused. The building is referred to as slaughterhouse number five. During this unfolding of events Billy is able through nonlinear narrative to experience future and past happenings in sequence and repetitively. Apparently it happens that he is kidnapped by aliens, extraterrestrial aliens to be precise who hail from the planet Tralfamadore. He is put in a zoo as an exhibit and in his company is Montana Wildhack a B-movie starlet. The aliens who are referred to as Tralfamadorians, have the ability to see things in four dimensions and due to this they are able to see every instant of their lives. (Vonnegut, 2001) With time Billy is becomes convinced and starts to think in the like mindedness of the aliens that they cannot exert their will and change anything about their fates but they could make the decision to concentrate upon any chosen moment of their lives. Through the travel of time by Billy, or as he believes he travels, through the past and future, he is able to see his life in real time and in fantasy. His new ability enables him to be in the alien world, Tralfamadore and spend some time there, as well as in Dresden while he was in the and making his way through the snow hours before he was taken captive by the Germans. He time travels back to even the 1950s and the early 1960s where he was married in the U.S.A. Amazingly he is able to envision the time of his death where he was murdered by a man named Paul Lazzaro who was just a petty thief. (Vonnegut, 2001) A series of events consequentially leads to Billy’s demise. Along the line of duty in the war, Billy’s path crossed with that of an individual called Roland Weary. The book describes him to be a bully as well as a jingoist character, just like Billy out of childhood. He is constantly criticized by Billy due to his lack psyche towards the war. They were captured together by the Germans and during their capture Roland’s possessions such as boots were confiscated. In place of the boots, Roland was given wooden clogs which were hinged to wear. As was expected, Weary passed on due to an infection called gangrene that was brought about by the clogs. Before his demise, Roland blames his apparent death on Billy and thus Paul Lazzaro who was also a fellow prisoner then, vows to avenge the death of Roland and that was by killing Billy. There are many moral lessons than can be found in this particular book. The first moral lesson I would like to talk about is the destructiveness of war. In whichever way we read the slaughterhouse-five novel, that is, as a quasi-autobiographical moral statement or as a science fiction, we are without a doubt able to agree that there are many destructive properties of war. We can refer to the catastrophic events of Dresden where it was firebombed during the world war two. As he undergoes swimming lessons at YMCA, forward to when he is at the lions club giving speeches and then to when he was captured and taken to Tralfamadore, with his ability to time travel, he travels in and out of the meat locker in Dresden. Due to luck, Billy survives an incineration and asphyxiation in a city which is at war and there is bombs raining from the sky. The war without a doubt changed Billy’s life for the worst comparing to the fact that he was very successful in the postwar life, when he was the president of the Lions club and was a Prosperous optometrist. Vonnegut through his skillful writing includes the science fiction thread of including the aliens to clearly indicate how the war has disrupted the life of Billy together with his existence. The hallucinations of the events with the Tralfamadorians could be a way in which Billy uses to escape from a world in which the war destroyed, in simpler terms it can be said that it is a workd in which he cannot understand. It seems to be too convenient the theory of the Tralfamoderians of the four dimensions, than just a way in which Billy can rationalize all the life’s that have been taken and that he has seen face-to-face. Another moral lesson is the illusion of free will. Vonnegut discusses the existence of free will through the Tralfamoderians, describing their toilet plunger shape which is absurdly humorous. Tralfamoderians only have the knowledge of the fourth dimension, which according to them they say contains all the events and moments of time that occur and reoccur endlessly as well as simultaneously. They believe that all events that are in the happening have already happened, that is, all events and moments repeat themselves without any end. They accept their fate since they believe that they don’t have the power to change them. The aliens say that it is only on earth where they have had anything about free will. They claim that humans see time as a rectilinear progression. The book depicts that throughout his life Billy has collided with forces that counter his free will. A good is example is when Billy’s father teaches him how to swim; he lets him drown with the idea that it will help him know how to swim. To his dismay, his son prefers to remain at the bottom of the pool, but against his free will, Billy is dragged out of the water. We can also see that Billy was drafted into the war against his free will. As a soldier, Billy is a joke and I say this because of the fact that he did not have any training, any proper clothing or supplies of any sort. Vonnegut accepts that with the presence of war or no war, death is a factor that cannot be evaded but he says that he has advised his sons to steer clear of massacres or in the manufacture of weapons used to execute them. The importance of sight is another moral lesson that is noted. It is difficult to define the concept of true sight in slaughterhouse-five. Billy was an optometrist and thus his duty was to correct the vision of his patients. By extending yonder the literal scope of his profession, we come to the conclusion that the author ingeniously sets up Billy with lenses with which to enhance the myopia of the world. Billy’s contribution to the true sight would have been through the knowledge of the fourth dimension. It can also be argued that Billy lacks sight completely and this from my point of view is through the fact that encountered horrific events and as a result he becomes mentally unstable. His grip on reality is shaky and he randomly gets overpowering flashbacks. Death and humor are also moral lessons found in the book. Vonnegut also puts across an under riding moral lesson of religion and humanity. He is inspired by the story of Lots wife in the Bible. Lot’s wife looked back at the cities of sin, He loves her due to this aspect because it shows the humanity in her. It begins to teach us the moral lesson of war and that it is not right. The book mentions God and Jesus throughout the chapters. This helps us to understand and justify the awful decisions we drive ourselves into. Talking about philosophies, the aliens had a philosophy of life which was based upon their perspective of time. They advice Billy on not to be concerned with the bad things that take place in our life’s but on the other hand to focus his attention onto the good things that happen. To some extent we see that Billy applies this philosophy in his life especially with the ability of not being stuck in time. Philosophy of the paradigm shift, which is the philosophy that is based on the ability to have time breaching perspective in four dimensions, it enables Billy to be unstuck in time. The morals in the book are very appropriate in today’s world especially the ones regarding to insight and the destruction of war. War if it was bound to happen would be a disaster causing phenomena because the kind of war machines that have been built today not forgetting the nuclear bombs which have the ability to wipe out the most of the earth’s population. War should never be a way of solving issues because even the innocent suffer and children who are the future of tomorrow are corrupted in the ways of the war and lives lost. Insight is important to the intellectuality of dealing with people and life’s everyday activities. It’s good to be wise since it guides you in the choices that you make. REFERENCES Alsen, E. (2005). Romantic Postmodernism in American Fiction. Toronto: Rodopi,. Jane Adamson, R. F. (2008). Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. London: Cambridge University Press. Vonnegut, K. (2001). Slaughterhouse Five. Arizona: RosettaBooks. Read More