Fate in Kurt Vonnegut’s Novel, Slaughterhouse-Five Essay

â€Å"Fate is a misconception, its only a cover-up for the fact you dont have control over your own life.† –Anonymous. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-five, an optometrist named Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time uncontrollably and constantly travels between his past, present, and future. Since Pilgrim is unable to control his time warps, he is forced to re-live agonizing moments such as watching his wartime friend Edgar Derby executed for stealing or going through the Dresden bombing repeatedly. However, he is also able to visit pleasant moments like speaking as president in front of the Lions club or his honeymoon with his wife, Valencia. Vonnegut’s use of repetition and vision of war, time and death are crucial to Pilgrim as he†¦show more content†¦They could always visit him or her with the use of time travel when he or she was alive. Because the phrase was very often repeated, it somewhat served as a tally to show how frequently d eath occurs and just how inevitable it is. Billy knew the exact date of his death and how it would happen, but he could not alter it and was no longer afraid of dying, so it had no effect on him because â€Å"there is no why[,]† it just â€Å"simply is† (77; ch4). He learned this from the Tralfamadorians. Through Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut protests his own feelings about war. Towards the beginning of the novel, Vonnegut visits his old wartime buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare and meets his wife, Mary. She is strangely already mad at Vonnegut because she assumed that he would write a war novel that will glorify the way men fight in wars when they actually send terrified babies off to war, not men. Mary also believed that war movies and books encouraged the chances of war. However, she was not directly angry at Vonnegut; she was angered by the thought of war and how babies are killing other babies on the battlefield. The main event in the novel was the fire-bombing on Dresden during World War II, which both Vonnegut and Pilgrim took part of. Billy Pilgrim was constantly traveling back in time to WWII already knowing this tragedy was going to take place. But again, he went on with life because he knew he could not stop the bombing fromShow MoreRelatedStyle Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut on Slaughterhouse Five1623 Words   |  7 Pagesexample, for instance, is Kurt Vonnegut who may have been stimulated by the war, thus writing Slaughterhouse Ââ€" Five. Though one may categorize this piece as science fiction or even auto - biographical, it can also be interpreted as an anti Ââ€" war piece. 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