Happiness And Death In Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse-Five'

Simple Discussion on Happiness and Death

Although many may see Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five as dark and dismal, he writes about nice moments that happen between the time of birth and death through the eyes of the weirdly optimistic character Billy Pilgrim. Most think of time as a linear timeline with everything moving in one direction towards an end goal, which for living creatures seems to be death. Whenever someone thinks of death it’s hard for them to not also talk about time and how much they have left. If time and death are interconnected, who’s to say that’s not such a bad thing after all? In the second chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five we were first introduced to the main character Billy Pilgrim, and within the first couple

Billy talked about these nice moments again and again, showing how he had a great appreciation for life, which was reinforced when he met the Tralfamadorians and they explained how time really passes, “If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we 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 these moments are nice,” (269). When reading this book quite a few of us believed that it proved how monotonous and boring life was, when it really just de-emphasized death and made the lives of the characters much more meaningful. In fact, Slaughterhouse-Five is not Vonnegut’s only novel where his overall message can be found, which is that all life is moving towards death, so we might as well find at least okay-ness, even in the face of doom and gloom. Even though his approach may seem much too simple, it is often difficult for us as humans to think of the chronology of life instead of just the end result of death. In his anthology A Man Without a Country as well as in a plethora of speeches, Vonnegut shares his knowledge and theme of many of his books, "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at