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.