Optimism In Voltaire’s Eyes

The positive thought of “everything is for the best”, that Voltaire so deeply criticizes is the fuel to the sixth and seventh chapter. The opening discussion point is the astonishing death of Pangloss, the philosopher. This event completely demoralizes Candide who questions the life statement he has lived to up to this point in the book. “If this is the best of all possible worlds [. . .] what can the rest be like?” (37). This is the game Voltaire is slowly introducing to us, his novel is based on making fun of the possibility of a person truly accepting a life that is cemented on the belief that all is for the best, that horrible moments are simply meant to be. This is becoming clearer through the pages that show how a positive attitude is slowly destroyed by horrible events that are inevitable through the journey.

The effects that Pangloss’ death have on Candide, change the course of his beliefs, the ideas he once stood up for are crumbling into pieces. Candide tells us the following after Pangloss’ death: “but when it comes to my dear Pangloss being hanged [. . .] I must know the reason why” (37). The theory Voltaire criticizes looks perfect on paper, the belief that everything is perfect and meant to be, is shown to be a way to free the individual’s mind from the catastrophes of life. It becomes the obligation of each individual to apply this theory in his personal life but you need to factor in the inevitable negative and sometimes absolutely illogical events that happen in one’s life. When it is our turn to suffer we can’t understand what is happening, why if everything is meant to be for the best do we have to suffer? Is living to the thought that everything is for the best, truly optimism or is it a simplistic, mediocre way to take refuge behind a weak lie, that all we live has to happen, that we are powerless in fate’s hands?

Voltaire quickly changes the suffering events in his novel to keep showing examples of how this life statement crumbles when being obligated to live terrible events by going back to the optimistic Candide. The one that feels that his “past life seemed like a nightmare and the present moment a happy dream” (39). We are back to the show Voltaire is plotting, the show that shows an individual who falls back to the theory his writer hates when confronting the good moments of his life but is thrown back to the lamenting and questioning when confronting the bad moments. This chapter leaves one huge question in my mind, what does Voltaire propose?

In A Moment Of Suffering…

One of the main topics I have recurrently seen in my readings is how bad events can completely transform an individual and their life. I have noticed a pattern in the ideas of Vonnegut, Epictetus and Voltaire pertaining to the concept of predestination, the way by which they understand and accept the horrible event of their lives. An example of this is when Candide concludes “that all is for the best in this world of ours” (27). We can see how Voltaire accepts the events that happen in a human being as meant to be. This takes some guilt off any decisions an individual has made, making it an easier to be in an appreciative and more open state of mind towards life. This is another topic we have been hearing a lot about in class, the way by which our decision opportunities become a burden after we have decided what to do. This looking back into the past is what is described all over Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, the immortality of events and the way by which you can see your life as a positive whole due to its composition of a substantial quantity of good events compared to the not so good ones.

We are told through the words of Pangloss that “the same causes produce the same effects” (34). We are shown the example of a natural disaster that affects two cities thousands of kilometers apart, Lisbon and Lima. This gives us the possibility to understand that fate is indifferent to language, religion, social status or political tendencies, it is a factor that affects us all. It is this same cause, the necessity of events happening for the better that will always give the result of change, for good or bad. This is an interesting idea Voltaire exposes as the reader can get the whole picture, the idea of having an entity of life factor that determines the course of our life without distinction.

Accepting the path we are destined to take isn’t an easy thing. Voltaire shows another part of this philosophy as he states that “private misfortunes contribute to the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are the more we find that all is well” (31). This plays with the human tendency to compare the actions and events that happen in each individual with the other. By being able to have other misfortunes worse than ours and by having the possibility of being able to compare our own to theirs, and yet know that it was all fated, we are free of the responsibility of carrying all misfortune on our shoulders. It is a mental liberation that seems to be theoretically effective, but are we truly able to surrender all our thoughts of having the opportunity to be better every day? Can we live without hoping and possibly creating a better destiny for ourselves, others and our planet?

Candide: The Optimistic Fate

Voltaire begins his novel through a description of his main character Candide, who “combined sound judgment with unaffected simplicity” (19). The narrator slowly contextualizes the relationship between young Candide and the wise tutor, Pangloss. We are immediately immersed in the philosophy of optimistic fate where “there is no effect without a cause” (20). It makes it seem like the whole book will be about the pursuit of happiness through the acceptance of the events that gradually make our characters. We are shown how great young Candide is and how his house and family are of vital importance in his life.

Pangloss describes that everything in life “was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose” (20). The language and sentence composition Voltaire uses for this character is very useful since the reader knows exactly what he is talking about. As I read the first chapter I found it very interesting to compare it to the previous book I read, the Handbook of Epictetus. Epictetus chooses the voice of a narrator to expose his message of predestination and limits his message through the example he gives. On the other hand Voltaire uses one of his characters to expose his message, this shows one of the main differences between both pieces, Voltaire contextualizes messages in a story, Epictetus states his principles.

The optimism we can observe is directed to the absolute necessity of having a positive attitude towards what our destiny has slowly uncovered. Pangloss says “that those who maintain that all is right talk nonsense; they ought to say that all is for the best” (20). Voltaire attacks the effect that sad and horrible events that happen in a human’s life by showing that things may not be all right but that they have to happen for the general best. This is a different approach from Epictetus’ who shows that the good and bad events we can’t control are necessary for the well-being of the human kind, the master play. Will Voltaire continue giving us messages through the teachings of Pangloss and their effects on Candide or will he completely change the objective of his piece?

Identifying Identity

As the reader continues the Handbook of Epictetus, he is immersed in a world of imperative statements. Epictetus has a strong voice, that makes each individual believe that he has a task in each aspect of his life for the good of the group. Epictetus’ universe is perfectly planned so that every action and sacrifice will build up the world’s history perfectly. He states that just “as a target is not set up to be missed, in the same way nothing bad by nature happens in the world” (27). This thought of connecting the daily events and problems with the destiny of the world explains a lot of Epictetus’ theory. He explains to his followers why it isn’t important to be tremendously affected by the bad moments of life, he truly gives hope by exposing that these events have to happen, they don’t depend on our decisions and actions.

This differentiation between the aspects of life that are our responsibility and those that are not, is a crucial concept in order to understand Epictetus’ teachings as I have tried to show in my previous posts (Death Is Destiny and Limiting Death). Epictetus describes that we can learn “the will of nature from the things in which we do not differ from each other” (26). This further explains how to not be moved by the ups and downs of life by maintaining a constant awareness of the importance our life has for the universe. By accepting that life, death, loss and fortune are events each individual has to live, we are assured it is something that characterizes nature, and is not up to us to decide, influence or contradict.

The point of view Epictetus shows through his work, also considers human nature to be different in a unique way for each human being. He talks about how “different people are naturally suited for different things” (29). This shows how human differences are tied with personality characteristics instead of needs and states. These different traits are determining factors in the role each human being will play and their effect on the greater picture, the connection between the actions of all the actors to the main play. Epictetus slowly turns the lights on, this helps the reader get accustomed to the different light that he is giving the world of our minds, the world of our identity and existence.

Dear Robert Frost,

I have been reading part of your work which I found very interesting and extravagant. The poem that most caught my attention was The Road Not Taken, which narrated the story of a person who tries to choose which path to take. I like how you are able to use the language in such an elaborate way, but I think you truly missed the idea of choice-making. In my handbook, the Handbook of Epictetus, you will be able to learn how to live and how decision-making isn’t up to each individual. In the first section you will read that some “things are up to us and some are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions – in short, our own doing” (1). You will learn what death and fate really are, as you clearly lack this knowledge.

It is of vital importance that you truly learn the importance of not being the creator or playwright of your story as I clearly share in the handbook. You only are “an actor in a play, which is as the playwright wants it to be” (16). If he wants to make you a soldier, he will make you a soldier, if he wants you to be poor or rich, he will be able to play with your fortune and so on. There is an obligation, as we become influential writers to not use our literature to convince people of wrongful ideas, there is a supreme necessity to let people now what they are really supposed to do and guide them through the process.

When you say, “I-- / I took the one less traveled by” do you really mean that he took the decision to send me by the one less traveled by? These are the problems that proofreading picks up, you truly need to practice that some more. I like what I see overall, even though I don’t understand what the final goal of your writing is. Are you trying to trick human beings into believing they have more power than they really do? You should check if your language is appropriate for a substantial portion of people as my handbook is able to do, and if your words carry line by line, the true message you want them to have. I would appreciate your contacting me at your earliest convenience after reading the accompanying information.

Sincerely,
Epictetus

Limiting Death

How can death be an advisor, a force that lets us know what to do? In the Handbook of Epictetus, we are shown a different approach to death, not as the final step to life but as a daily coach that helps us get an exceptional perception about life’s priorities. Epictetus believes that you have to let “death and exile and everything that is terrible appear before your eyes every day, especially death; and you will never have anything contemptible in your thoughts or crave anything excessively” (21). By understanding how fragile and impermanent everything in our universe is, a soul who is truly aware of death will try to make as little earthly attachments as possible. This soul would stop wondering what the future will bring, since it understands and accepts that death is all there finally is. The constant decay and end of all things in order to bring to birth the next fresh cycle. Epictetus connects death with the understanding of what is and what isn’t up to you, in a discrete fashion. By explaining how fate brings and takes characters, plots and scenarios from your specific play, you begin to accept and understand what is really up to you to decide and act upon.

Expectations transform us, they force our minds to be impatient, to be silenced by that which we are waiting for. A similar thing happens with demands, we are so focused on what we want to happen that we will cross every barrier to get it. Epictetus believes that “you cannot demand an equal share if you did not do the same things, with a view of getting things that are not up to us” (25). This statement helps Epictetus show and back up his main idea, how important it is to let things go, to understand how to let life take its natural course, without human intervention. Sometimes the things which we least put our efforts into are the ones that come out better. Our hopes, expectations and demands mold our momentary being and can change our lives and characters into impatient and unhappy souls. Epictetus is showing his brainwork on disappointed souls and the steps by which a human being could stop lamenting any event in his life.

By having knowledge of the inherent death and impermanence in every object and event in life, your expectations and demands diminish immediately. As you don’t demand anything that you haven’t worked for, you are never disappointed. It seems to me that Epictetus is building a Buddhist formula for a perfect, realized human being. A true handbook for life which protects its followers from ever being affected through simple principles that point out the purpose and function of each living being. Is there a true way to never be hurt by life’s events, wouldn’t this lead to being purposeless and without affect or passion?

Acting With Patience

In the second ten sections of the Handbook of Epictetus, we are shown how to confront destiny in a patient fashion, not showing necessity through our actions. According to Epictetus, you should “not stretch your desire toward it, but wait until it comes to you” (15). He compares destiny to your behavior in a banquet, where you wait until they offer you something to eat, you don’t stretch your body to get food. There is an obligation to wait and not to act, a predestination requisite, to understand that the universe’s energy will flow and eventually reach you with its intended and unique might. Through his descriptions on how to act, the reader is assured that there is a partial free will, the decision making of a soul’s opinions and desires. These are the two complementary pieces to the Handbook of Epictetus, as I mentioned in my previous post Death Is Destiny.

The handbook shows that a person depends too much on his/her judgments or beliefs in order to act. It concludes that it is a human necessity to do so as it states that when someone “irritates you be aware that what irritates you is your own belief” (16). We are often told that there is always something positive in everything and everybody. Epictetus has another way to narrate another take on this belief, by pointing out the tendency of most people to find mostly mistakes in others and place more emphasis on these.
This may imply that there needs to be awareness training for humans, to learn to use their minds consciously towards uplifting thoughts than wasting their energy on promoting and empowering the draining negative.

Epictetus continues his narration on predestination, in which you are “an actor in a play, which is as the playwright wants it to be” (16). There is an obligation to concentrate in playing your part the best way you can, changing the human’s mentality from worrying about death and events he can’t change into accepting and confronting the variety of obstacles that will come in his way and making intelligent choices. There is a tendency in Epictetus’ words to guide a lost soul back into what he considers a good path, by showing the things he can’t do in order to change what he can. What seems to be destiny in Epictetus’ writing are the set obstacles that come instead of the specific decisions and paths the living soul may take. This “playwright” isn’t described or given the appropriate importance it should have for the handbook. Will Epictetus include in his piece that religion and the belief in god/the divine playwright are necessary to a more complete understanding this sacred game of life?

Death Is Destiny

As the reader begins the Handbook of Epictetus he is immersed in a world of knowledge which changes his perception about human destiny and anger. In the first section, Epictetus classifies life factors into those that are out of human control like disease, death and reputation, and those that can be controlled through a person’s actions like opinions and aversions. According to Epictetus, you will be miserable and lost if you “think that things naturally enslaved are free or that things not your own are your own” (11). This means that you have be able to know which things you can control and which things you can’t, a similar statement to that of the serenity prayer we repeatedly found in Slaughterhouse Five. The acceptance of this conclusion will lead a human being into a world of limits, by which he will be self-guided to understanding his life as dependant on the events that happen in his life, his perception of them, and roads taken on his arduous quest of his own unique and personal destiny.

The ideas, conclusions and life models you favor and those you are against, of are will determine who you are and what you’ll do. You also have to be able to determine which of these you can control and which life factors such as death can help you be wiser on how you choose to spend your time on the planet. In order to create a path in the right direction, you have to “detach your aversion from everything not up to us, and transfer it to what is against nature among the things that are up to us” (12). In order to accept death as your ineludible last step in the life cycle, you have to take it off the list of things you are against and help “death” keep your decisions in perspective. Death not as the destructor of life but as the final teaching ingredient of life.

In the Handbook of Epictetus, you are also confronted with the deceit of human judgment. As you begin to open your soul to the new input on death as part of life, Epictetus bombards you by saying, “death is nothing dreadful […] but instead the judgment about death that it is dreadful” (13). We have arrived at what I thought was Epictetus’ main point, humans build up opinions on judgments of opinions, on and on endlessly over time and in the end, they mistakenly accept these misleading conclusions as the truth. They become facts that become the basis of a human life’s, the race to escape death and suffering, but in the end if you are not able to accept death and suffering, you will not have fully lived.

Serenity Prayer In Tralfamadore

Thesis Statement:
The serenity prayer and the Tralfamadorian teachings are complementary to understanding Kurt Vonnegut’s philosophy on war given to us through Billy Pilgrim’s quest.

Sections for close reading:
-“Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones-to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by. ” (Vonnegut, Pg. 69)
-“Billy Pilgrim says now that this really is the way he is going to die, too. As a time- traveler, he has seen his own death many times, has described it to a tape recorder.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 50)
-“I've visited thirty-one inhabited plants in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31)
-“Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 22)

Ending The Endless

Not being able to fully appreciate what life has given you, the sweet and the sour, and at the same time appreciate and fully attend what is happening in the present moment, is the repetitive fault of every human life. As I write this entry I’m waiting for my mother to arrive in a couple of minutes with my delicious dinner, from my favorite Italian restaurant. As I think of this event, I realize that in a couple of hours, after I’ve finished my food, I will not even remember how anxious and impatient I once was for my dinner. Being in this extreme futuristic state of mind is usually unhealthy. Living in the future is not a good idea to enjoy a truly happy state of mind. This is what Kurt Vonnegut shows us in the last two chapters of his novel, Slaughterhouse Five. As the narrator reflects on the conclusions an extra-terrestrial community has come up with, his mind races to know how truthfully happy he has been and if he could be able to live with the eternal repetition of his life’s good moments. “If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still- if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 74) This is a different kind of eternity than the one we can extract from Gilgamesh, which narrates the eternity of one’s actions. Here we can see an eternity of the mind, a process by which you are able to control your present actions by the thought of having to live those events forever.

Being conscious of how the present becomes your past in a second by second basis, you target your life to be the most passionate and richly wonderful possible, so you become the most fulfilled and wise human being you can be. As Billy realizes the state of the horses which are transporting some of the American prisoners of war through the destructed Dresden, we are able to approach Vonnegut’s mind in an understanding manner. “When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn't cried about anything else in the war.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 70) It is truly difficult to accept something like this, when you just lived a massacre of the dimensions of Dresden, you can’t understand how a human being only cares for some horses. There is more empathy for the animals than for the humans. This may be a defense mechanism to protect himself from the human horror. This brings me to my next conclusion about Billy, he isn’t completely cognizant of what he has lived and is too concerned with living in the never-ending repetition of events to be accepting of his present. Billy doesn’t notice anything, he is just there to live it. There is no other way to understand war in a positive attitude than to accept it as something that we just had to live, a terrible fate of sorts.

Allowing oneself to explore the limits of our minds, and the capabilities of our soul to appreciate what we are living and all of the positive events that make us up is one of the crucial pieces to be in a relaxed and accepting state of mind. There is always a necessary step to not take things too personally, it isn’t that the universe is against an individual being, but that there is a strong tendency to take our spirit into a quest to find ourselves and ultimately be able to live in a moment by moment basis, as the following maxim describes. “Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones-to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by. ” (Vonnegut, Pg. 69) Fate is a strong character at the end of this novel. Fate is the messenger which lets us know that it is our task, and our task only, to try to live in the greatest state of mind we can possibly obtain with effort, discipline and acute awareness, ultimately finding a balance between our sealed past, our live present and our ripening future.

Characterizing War

Is there a way to understand the horrors of war? Is there a justification to any war?
The readers of Chapter 8 of Slaughterhouse Five are shown Kurt Vonnegut’s views on war and its destructive characteristics. As Edgar Derby states, “Mere are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after an, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 58) It’s not only the casualties of the actual act of war but the huge repercussion it has on the specific communities and individuals who suffer it. This can be seen in the vast quantities of war veterans which have to be treated after the war because they just don’t know who they are and what they want to do anymore. Their appetite for life is gone and they have no way of returning to who they once were before the war. War not only kills people it kills the souls of the living. They are too devastated by the lead boots they have to drag through their lives, the memories of destruction and indescribable horror and pain.

At his eighteenth wedding anniversary, Billy Pilgrim is astoundingly affected (gets pale, has to sit down and finally leaves to his room) by a quartet which was playing at his party. “Billy thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then found an association with an experience he had had long ago.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 63) This is extremely significant in proving Vonnegut right about the effects war has on veterans. Being the eighteenth anniversary means that the relationship between Billy and his wife is of age and has become another problem in Billy’s life. This quartet in his wedding anniversary is connected to four guards back in Dresden, a story he narrates to Montana in Tralfamadore. “He told Montana about the four guards who, in their astonishment and grief, resembled a barber-shop quartet.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 63) These four German guards, are the first one’s to emerge from the room under the Slaughterhouse and see the destruction of Dresden. It is incredible how a simple event in such a traumatic situation can mean so much for so long. It vividly shows that no one is immune from the disaster, the guards, the prisoners, those who win, those who loose. All are victims of the insanity of war. If this seemingly minor event means so much to Billy, what would a devastating memory such as the assassination of his friends do to him? One wonders what other events will soon be uncovered to show us more complexities of Billy’s intricate and traumatized inner landscape and Vonnegut’s mind?

When A Equals B…

One of the main ingredients in Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is irony. From the beginning we are forced, or maybe taken through the process, to understand how absurd war and life really is. By making us laugh about the adventures of Billy Pilgrim, we notice how the goal is always present, to make a joke out of a horrible story. In chapter seven, we encounter irony in the first couple of sentences. “Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 55) In Billy, the novel’s protagonist, we see a perfect example of a machine. He goes to work, marries the person with the best connections, has children as his society stipulates and is depressed due to the horrible events in his life. The irony in this maxim is that the only beings that can really evaluate if we, as part of the Universe, are machines have to be outside of our planet. What Vonnegut is referring to here is how we continue doing what our society tells us to, how it has become the work of a machine to do our daily activities.

Vonnegut plays with the definitions of events and objects through his characters as he makes them unaware and ignorant of what they’re confronting. As Billy is taken in a toboggan down Sugarbush Mountain after his plane crash, he passes under a seat lift where he sees young people flying through the air in yellow seats and he, “supposed that they were part of an amazing new phase of the Second World War. It was all right with him. Everything was pretty much all right with Billy.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 56) The complete unawareness of the situation and his machine identity caused by the war have made Billy believe that everything he sees must have something do with the war and has to let go of, as he had to do in order to reintegrate (in a partial way) with his life as an optometrist. As everything was all right with Billy, Vonnegut builds up on his previous conclusion, that war makes people machines. This makes it easier to live hard times and be satisfied with the bare minimum, never striving for more. Blind acceptance or full denial become the survival mechanisms to continue living after the unthinkable horrors of war.

Another example of how Vonnegut shows irony in a direct fashion, using his characters as puppets is the conversation between the cook of the Dresden camp, the guard of the slaughterhouse and the two American soldiers. “'All the real soldiers are dead,' she said. It was true.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 57) Stating that Derby was too old, Werner (the guard) too young and Billy simply inappropriate for war defends the conclusion Kurt is making, war is inappropriate.

Accepting An Uncomfortable Truth

Being aware of death as the final, unavoidable last act in every human life, is just the beginning to trying to explore the unconscious effects this fact has on how we live our lives. Society’s views also affects our understanding of this most important issue. In the sixth chapter of the novel, Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut we are introduced to the position of the main character, Billy Pilgrim, to his own death in the hands of his killer, Paul Lazarro. Lazarro, one of the people Billy meets during the war, is convinced that Pilgrim was responsible of the death of Roland Weary, Lazaro’s only war friend, threatening Billy of sending someone to kill him after the war. “Billy Pilgrim says now that this really is the way he is going to die, too. As a time- traveler, he has seen his own death many times, has described it to a tape recorder.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 50) Being able to confront death as a natural part of life is one thing, but being able to document it on tape with the greatest serenity possible is simply incredible. We are not used to having these types of encounters in a sentence of a book, even with the greatest clues an author can give us. It is probably one of the techniques Kurt uses in his book, to clandestinely bombard the reader with statements that change the perception of his characters and the story giving it suspense, depth and action.

How convinced the reader is about Billy Pilgrim’s tranquility with death, is something we are assured, as Billy states the following in one of his Tralfamadorian conferences in Chicago. “If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 51) His audience seems more terrified about his death than he is, as he claims to know that his assassination is that same night after he leaves the conference. Vonnegut makes it look like Billy is more interested in his audience knowing the reasons for him acknowledging that death isn’t a bad thing, it’s just one bad event that is small compared to all the good moments a life contains. As soon as we are able to understand this and be taken again by the author back to World War II we can appreciate how complete Kurt’s game is. He has taken us on a trip about Billy Pilgrim’s life, Tralmafadorian style, making a depressing story funny and joyous for the reader who shouldn’t be looking for any special message or moral ending, but just understanding how life has to be taken in a detached, non judgmental fashion in order to truly enjoy each second of this lifelong film.

Vonnegut gives us the last amazing piece at the end of this chapter, as the American prisoners of war enter Dresden. “It was Fate, of course, which had costumed him-Fate, and a feeble will to survive.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 54) The importance of destiny in Vonnegut’s narration is vital, we need to ignore this permanent question of Why are things happening? to be able to appreciate the book at its greatest extent and understand the goals he is trying to achieve with this piece. His Tralfamadorians are especially powerful in this chapter, given that they leave their position as characters in the book, to become the whole philosophy in which the reader is now immersed. In this way, they become important not only to Billy, in order to understand the horrible events of his life but for the reader. The reader who has become a more independent, all-knowing and curious observer. This allows Vonnegut to continue his narrative without alarming anyone of the presence of a non human character in the book. Billy’s higher-self comfortably disguised as an ET, who will probably end up convincing us all.

Many Versus A Lot

Perfect synonyms are almost impossible to find, words may have a similar definition, yet they have a different effect on the reader and on the whole written outcome. We can see this in David Crystal’s blog On Many, where he shows us how the word “many” has a different use than the word “a lot” depending on the subject you are talking about and the nouns accompanying the modifier. A correspondent asked him, “Does many actually refer to a different number from a lot of?” (David Crystal, On Many) to which David responded that there are different cases in which you can use these words without making the tone change between the modifier and the noun. The use of many in situations such as many hybrid cars gives a notion that is, “perhaps a mite too downmarket for an upmarket quantifier, as would be many hiccups, many flutters (on the races), and so on, where one of the lot constructions would be the usual quantifier.” (David Crystal, On Many) This ends up being in a discussion of the tone of each word and how it affects the reader and the overall tone of the written piece in a specific way when written beside other words. The choice of using a word is something you acquire as you explore the language through its history and the use of each independent word which changes between the different cultures and regions. The flow of the sentences, the overall outcome is what matters, not the independent words. Think of a recipe, each ingredient adds something special and unique, in more than one way, to the overall dish.

Understanding The Misunderstood

Have you ever felt that this hour took years to pass? Or that the weekend was just a couple of minutes? Time makes sense to those who understand that it won’t make sense at all, for those who are prepared to not know. This is what I was thinking as I read Chapter 5 of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, in which the Tralfamadorians (creatures of another planet who are able to see time as a complete repertoire of events instead of living each independent event) see human beings as, “great millipedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) This shows a different kind of game that time plays with us, not being able to see an event as a moment but just as part of a film, a lifetime film. This book is filled up with these events and descriptions that play with our appreciation and understanding of a natural yet mysterious thing such as time.

Kurt continues this chapter by describing the art of these living beings where, “There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) Showing how all of this society is motivated by a type of impressionism, this love for seeing beautiful moments with no motivation, purpose or sequence makes them a society I had never even thought of. In the first chapters of the book I thought the author was trying to describe his personal utopia, but as I continued reading the book I changed my understanding of the whole purpose of the piece which in my mind has ended up being in his narrating of a story that has no purpose or sequence, a writer writing on his own writing with the goal of exploring the “depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time” in this case, the life of Billy Pilgrim.

Making fun out of a life tragedy isn’t that easy to do, this is how I explain the importance of the Flying Saucer and the Tralfamadorians in the book. They simply make it fun and disorganized, meeting all of the necessary requirements: be very far away from earth so no one will link them with anything they’ve seen or believed in, make them different from all existing creatures so you don’t feel attached or partial towards them in any way, and the most important of all, make them easy to manipulate and make a novel out of them. The character of the narrator is ever-changing between two formats. First, it is in narrating mode to tell us of what Billy feels and does as we see in the following maxim. “She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 37) Tragic Billy is necessary for us to get the true message, he serves as an example of a soul that never found any passionate goal or reason for life. The second narrating format is message mode in which we are told what to do to not follow Billy’s path. “That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 42) The author teaches his common sense philosophy through the mouth of strange extraterrestrials because humans are so disconnected from their central source of wisdom, nature, that they have lost their ability to navigate their limited time with wisdom and humor.

Living In Amber

As the reader ventures through Chapter 4 of Slaughtehouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, it is difficult to determine the intentions and true meaning of the ideas in the book and their effects on Billy, the main character of the novel. We can see this in the conversation between Billy and the Tralfamadorians as they take him in the night of his daughter’s wedding to Tralfamadore. When he asks them why did they choose him over the other humans they respond, “Because this moment simply is.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 28) confirming the conclusions I exposed in my previous post, which explains the hopelessness of Billy due to the impossibility of him believing that he can decide, and that his decisions will build up to create his future. This feeling of having everything already decided, the powerlessness and futility of it all, is what I believe was the main cause of his alcoholism, his despair, and his sleeping disorders.

As we are introduced with the flying saucer of the Tralfamadorians, and all of the stolen furniture they have to make Billy comfortable, it is difficult not to question the purpose of having these strange creatures in the book. Are they supposed to make us feel identified with some of their ideas? Are they connected in some way, or serve as an explanation for the atrocities of World War II? These questions are not answered in the chapter but they have built up with hundreds of other questions about these creatures from previous chapters. Destiny and free-will are questioned incessantly: “I've visited thirty-one inhabited plants in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) This distancing from the belief of free-will, which has served to create nations such as the United States, where independent choices and the right to pursue one’s own happiness are believed to be essential for every human being is in direct contradiction with this book. We are destined to be and change our social and economical levels not because of our decisions or any laws we have created and believe in, but simply because it just is. We are not living our lives, life is living itself out through us. We are just its robot puppets.

As Billy asks himself how did he get into this world inside the flying saucer of the Tralfamadorians, they answer that that’s for humans to understand but that what is really important is to know that what they are like bugs in amber. “Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 31) The frozen rigidness of that description is astounding, the amber being life itself, we stuck in it, no way forward, no way out. Will all these explanations and descriptions end up having any similarity with any previous philosophical concept of life? Who or what decides this everlasting anthology of events and what is the final purpose of our world, of our individual lives? Nihilism, the belief that nothing has any value seems to permeate Vonnegut’s soul. A secure formula to sink us, not into amber but into chronic depression.

Serenity, Courage And Wisdom

In Billy, the main character of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, we see a person who is absolutely hopeless due to the low range of possibilities in his life, since he believes, he is living in what has happened in his past, what is happening in his present, and what will happen in his future. Vonnegut makes this character completely unmotivated about his life in a way that makes the book have a motor of its own kind. By having an all-knowing narrator, the author gives us the opportunity to gain a complete description of his character, in bits and pieces, as he travels through time, and at the same time know more than what the character perceives about his surroundings.

We can see this in Chapter 3, where Vonnegut shows the positive side of his character’s depression as he describes the following quote on one of Billy’s office walls. “GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE, COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN, AND WISDOM ALWAYS TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 22) With this the author mentions that this mentality has helped Billy to go on through his disastrous life, which has no clear objective or purpose. Vonnegut also tells us in a quick and painless way that, “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 22) which gives the reader all the information he needs to know, that Billy is in his condition due to the impossibility to do what a human being is normally frightened and yet empowered to do: to choose between different options and thus be an active creator of his life. Not being able to forget the past or be scared of the future gives Billy no point in doubting what his decisions might guide him into. Being frightened of what is to come, is a small thing compared to the depression a human being must feel when being convinced that any decision he or she makes will have no effect on their life, that all decisions have already been made. It’s a forced fate at its worst. Life not as an adventure but as a life sentence.

At the end of the chapter, Vonnegut gives us the chance to reconsider our position on the condition of the character, who is not only having dreams of how his life was and how it is going to be, but of a strange group of people that have changed his life, up to what we know, in a way that can’t be positive. “Billy Pilgrim nestled like a spoon with the hobo on Christmas night, and he fell asleep, and he traveled in time to 1967 again- to the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 26) Vonnegut exposes how Billy is living as a prisoner of war in Germany and being kidnapped at the same time by the “Trafalmadorians” in the same chain of thought, without making the reader jump. This shows us how his narrator is absolutely effective in convincing us of Billy Pilgrim’s story, and gets us hooked for the next chapter, which is promising new stories and details that have in multiple occasions radically transformed our point of view on the objective of the book, in only three chapters. Vonnegut is definitely a unique master story teller that forces the reader to think and re-analyze constantly. This kind of book keeps you on your toes, on high alert and opens one’s appetite for more.

Giving In

Hallucination, in my opinion is the result of oppressed dreams and desperate solutions one’s mind creates in response to our life dilemmas. We can see this in the character Billy, of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Billy, an optometrist who fought in the Second World War, is obsessed on telling the world about a group of people called Tralfamadorians who have interesting conclusions about death and time. For example, the say that dead beings are “still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 9-10) This shows a different kind of immortality I had never considered, it isn’t that one’s actions stay on earth as the story of our world and the effect we had on it, both positive and negative, but the moment to moment immortality, the never-ending movie of the same moment that is somehow stored in the universe. Quantum physicists have concluded that time does not exist. From this, we can conclude that Vonnegut is showing how his character, Billy, is trying to find a reason for how people come and go, changing his tragedies for an all encompassing concept, that may sound like a hallucination but may in fact be true, even if it is difficult for our minds to grasp the idea in its entirety. Science fiction always sounded hallucinatory when originally published, to later become prophetic of real scientific discoveries and truths.

Due to his situation, the loss of his wife, the plane crash of which he was the only one to survive and the war he lived, he needs an answer to the destiny of the people who left and if he will ever see them again. Following this logic he creates the following description of life after death. “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”” (Vonnegut, Pg. 10) Once I heard that the only thing that’s sure is that one is going to die, for so, this extremist point of view has a basic idea, to understand death as a natural thing that shouldn’t influence the living beings, since their were many other moments where this death didn’t exist. We don’t just see this in Billy’s words but in his actions too, as he gives us a strange and different approach to his wife’s death.

Being able to overcome difficult situations is probably the hardest thing a human being has to do, being able to do so as Billy does is absolutely astounding. But this makes Billy a sad person, who, through Vonnegut’s descriptions appears as the suicidal people I talked about in my last blog. In the following maxim, Billy is being rescued from the deepest part of a swimming pool where his father is trying to teach him to swim by the method of “sink or swim”. “He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 16) Being convinced that life would never be good for him, that he would never have joy, young Billy feels he is destined to die, but in a way what Vonnegut shows, is that we are all destined to live and learn through suffering since we already know we are destined to die. We each must still find meaning to this journey even if it has an inevitable ending. We each need to use death as an advisor not send death inappropriate early invitations.

Requirements To Become A Pillar Of Salt

There is always a moment of surrender in a human being. There is a necessity to look at what has been done and what is to come. It is an obligation of every human being to surrender to absurd, unfair, insane realities either lived or shared vicariously and learn how to leave behind the painful past. We can vividly see this through the words of Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. “The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 4) As the narrator answers Nancy, the writer of a story he was reporting for Chicago City News Bureau, that he has seen “lots worse than that” of a case of a man that got trapped with an elevator door while he was inside his car getting smashed with the roof, we can see how horrendous war is for veterans. Not being able to talk to somebody leads people who have lived untold horrors for others security to take refuge in alcohol or suicide or become part of the living dead. I remember a tragedy that occurred here in Bogota many years ago where a man, who was a Vietnam/Korean vet, walked into a busy Italian restaurant, owned by some friends and proceeded to shoot at everybody and then committed suicide. It was not enough to have suffered war but be changed forever, become mentally ill and push yourself and others to an unimaginable horror and to an early grave.

As I studied the Holocaust in 7th grade English with Mrs. Leonard, something that caught my attention because I didn’t understand how it could be possible, was the idea that a group of modern people thought and persuaded others to believe that the Holocaust didn’t exist. It is offending and unconscious to even think of using your time to influence other people to believe that something of that level of horror and ignorance never happened. There is plenty of media, physical proof and survivors of the Holocaust, who amazingly continue fighting in a peaceful and conscious way, something not many could even dream of doing. “The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 4) These people Vonnegut talks about are those human beings we see and we hear about that amaze us into seeing how extremely brave and inspiring we humans can be. The lives and qualities of superior human beings such as Buda, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Arias Sanchez and Jesus are universally inspiring.

In the last lines of Chapter 1, we see how the veteran’s voice is swallowed by overwhelming grief and sorrow and how the stories he recounts apply to himself, an alcoholic repressed being that has no one to talk to. He did as Job’s woman did and looked back at what he had seen, done and lived, becoming a pillar of salt, and a conscious one at that. “People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 8) What takes us to look back is a factor, in my opinion of the very nature of the human being, who is in a way possessed to look back, to understand, to think, to learn, obsess and to grieve. We constantly risk becoming frozen by our past by moving it into the present with all that old, dead luggage leaving little room for a fresh, vibrant and hopeful present and future. Instead of learning from all our pasts with a huge grain of salt, wisdom and humor in our pockets, we risk becoming a dead pillar of infertile salt.

Continuing The Master’s Work

If I were to read the two remaining books of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, I would expect some kind of transformation in the relationship between the writer Dante and the character Dante. I have been told that all three books end with a mention to the stars which may be a reference to the nature of humans to appreciate and see themselves and their lives reflected in other creations of God. Also the idea that the destiny of our souls after death will depend on our closeness with those stars, the godly, the celestial. “My guide and I came on that hidden road to make our way back into the bright world; and with no care for any rest, we climbed – he first, I following – until I saw, through a round opening, some of those things of beauty heaven bears. It was from there that we emerged, to see – once more – the stars.” (Inferno XXXIV: 133-139) Something I just noticed as I read this maxim is that there are several references in these lines that must have to do with the other books.

The first one is the “hidden road” which may be the road between human sin and God’s mercy. Through the book, Dante repeats the idea of permanent punishment, we can see this as we pass through limbo which is destined for: “those who were worthy but lived before Christianity and/or without baptism… Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan.” (Inferno IV) which tells us that not many souls are able to change their place after death. Not many will see those stars again and the most important fact, for our purpose, none will make their way through to reach that “hidden road”. This makes it clear that it’s not likely that we will see these characters again, as we move on we will have a new batch of adventures. This also gives importance and power to the character Dante, which will probably change through the other books. I wouldn’t bet that the people we will meet in Purgatorio and Paradiso will look at Dante in the way we saw him through the circles of hell where the souls were bewildered by Dante being alive in hell.

As the reader journeys through Inferno there is a constant search in his mind to understand the geographical world Dante’s journey is taking place in. As I searched through Wikipedia, my friends blogs, and on several educational websites I analyzed there was a geographical connection between the three books. Hell, according to Dante was created by the fall of Satan from heaven which displaced the land, creating a mountain in an island on the other side of the world which became purgatory. This theory of Dante’s Universe agrees with the diagram “The Universe of Dante” in my edition of the book and the “round opening” Dante talks about in Canto XXXIV. This connection gives place to an important difference between Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso which consists in the language, descriptions and allegory used by the author in these three different scenarios. I believe Dante will now have a different opportunity to show us how the other parts of the Catholic universe works, how we can change our state of misery due to our sins in Purgatorio and the reward we get for being close to God in Paradiso. As the scene changes, the purpose of the writing changes and as these two pieces change, they transform the language, allegory and descriptions giving a whole new meaning to this incredible, magnificent work.