First a few quotes regarding the subject from the book:
'Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,' said the loudspeaker. 'Any questions?'
Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: 'Why me?'
'That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?'
Yes.' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three lady-bugs embedded in it.
'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.'" (Slaughterhouse-Five, p.76-77). This encounter demonstrates the Tralfamadorian concept of time and free will. Time is an illusion, and free will doesn't exist. In other point in the story, the Tralfamadorians address the concept of free will directly.
"If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."(Slaughterhouse-Five, p. 86)
What drives humanity? What is the basis for the existence of society? The answer is free will, the very thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. The very idea that you have the freedom to start fresh everyday is what makes a person strive to be their best. In the novel Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut takes a much different outlook on the issue. He believes that free will does not exist and each individual has a predestined future that they can do nothing to change: "Among the things that Billy could not change were the past, the present and the future." To suggest that free will does not exist is simply preposterous in my opinion. Through this idea, the author is not only taking a very pessimistic outlook on life, but also suggesting the fact that war is inevitable, that atrocities such as the holocaust and the Armenian genocide are expected to happen as a natural cycle of human history. This disgusts me. Where would we be if the greatest people in our society did not believe in determining their own fate? Where would we be of Rosa Parks has not refused to sit at the back of the bus? Where would be if Martin Luther King had not fought slavery and simply accepted the social order of the time? Without free will, as Kurt Vonnegut suggests, there would be no point in struggle for human rights and social change, which constitute the very foundation of western, democratic societies that we live in. To all these great people who fight for freedom, or simply to a person who may working as hard as he can to uplift himself from poverty, Mr. Vonnegut would say that these people are wasting their lives, because they put so much energy into fighting the predestined, and thus preventing happiness.
Gynter K.
TO BE CONTINUED...
A very clear stance.
ReplyDelete"Without free will, as Kurt Vonnegut suggests, there would be no point in struggle for human rights and social change, which constitute the very foundation of western, democratic societies that we live in."
SO TRUE. i am stunned by the quality of your writing. keep it up!
-henry
• Billy Pilgrim adopts this idea of "so it goes" in the novel, but does Vonnegut write Billy Pilgrim as an enviable character? Do we sympathize with Billy and want to be just like him? No. Vonnegut uses Billy to show exactly why the belief in fate is destructive. Billy alienates himself from the real world. Vonnegut is not putting this on a platform. He is warning readers, helping them to not become Billy Pilgrims. Kurt Vonnegut does not believe in fate over free will.
ReplyDeleteYou could say that there is a free will, but do you really believe we have the choice to do whatever? Don't you sometimes which you could of changed something in your past? For example a math exam you do poorly on. On the next one you are going to try harder, unless your lazy, but that feeling that emerges from your body could be "free will" or maybe you are supposed to fail that test so that the next one you ace. It could be that the failure was predetermined and you were going to fail no matter what you did. Eventually you can wonder all you want about free will and its limits, in the end you can never prove free will exists.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with you. I believe that what Vonnegut was trying to say in Slaughterhouse-five, wasn't that he didn't believe in free will but instead the opposite. He was trying to point out the dangers of apathy that results from denying the existence of free will. If Vonnegut did in fact believe that everyone should accept that we have an unchangeable destiny, do you think he'd portray Billy Pilgrim as such an unhappy, pathetic character? The irony is that Billy Pilgrim does have free will, he just chooses not to use it. For example, when his father throws him into the swimming pool he doesn't bother trying to swim. By choosing to deny the existence of free will, Billy is exercising his free will. Although I understand where you're coming from, I don't believe that someone as intelligent as Vonnegut, who wrote a novel that critiques war and apathy, was trying to say that freewill does not exist. He doesn't believe in destiny.
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