“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

Yes, that does sound nice, doesnʼt it? Yes, it does, Billy Pilgrim might think to

himself. He coins the phrase in reference to death; it occurs to him that “everything

was beautiful, and nothing hurt” would be a fitting epitaph for his tombstone (Vonnegut

155). But Billy need not be buried under a tombstone to identify with this mantra; he

spends his entire life turning an apathetic cheek to pain, rationalizing destruction,

neutralizing terror.

Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegutʼs desensitized hero in Slaughterhouse-Five, comes

to terms with a lot of terrible things in the course of his life. To do so, he adopts an

explanation which would help anybody deal with terrible things: there is simply nothing

we can do about it. And such is the complex dilemma underlying Slaughterhouse-Five:

How do we deal with tragedy? How do we explain it? Can we prevent it? Are there any

laws to life, and if so, do humans have any say in what these are? Does free will even

exist?

Kurt Vonnegut spins us a tale of Billy Pilgrim and his friends from outer space,

who assure him that free will is a mirage, and death hardly anything to shed a tear

over. But the discernibly pacifistic nature of Slaughterhouse-Five shows the reader

that for Vonnegut, not everything is beautiful. A lot of things do hurt. And we, as moral

humans, have a responsibility to acknowledge that pain and create meaning of it.

Using Billy as an antithesis for his own convictions, Kurt Vonnegut tackles the issue of

free will and confronts the reader with the same difficult questions about human nature

that he grappled with himself in the creation of the book.

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Justly, people have been asking questions about unsolicited tragedy since the

beginning of time. Most just want to know Why?: why me? why not me? why him?

Why her? In the Hebrew Bible, for example, the Book of Job is dedicated to these

questions. It tells the story of Job, a moral, God-fearing man who suffers irrevocable

losses---the destruction of all his possessions, the death of his entire family, the onset

of a painful ailment---all at the hands of Satan. The catch: Job suffers at the hands of

Satan, but it is God from whom Satan receives permission to inflict horrors on an

innocent man (NIV Bible).

“Does it please you to oppress me,” asks Job of God, “while you smile on the

schemes of the wicked?” (NIV Bible, Job 10.3) Why me? Job wants to know. Where is

justice?

The ultimate response Job receives from God, and one which he eventually

comes to terms with, is that no manʼs goodness exempts him from the forces of evil.

Ultimately, it is the choice of God, and not man, whether one should suffer or one

should prevail. Good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good

people.

Thatʼs just the way it is.

Vonnegut, a man who once wrote in his collection of essays A Man Without a

Country, “If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist,” would most likely

have trouble swallowing the notion that one solitary “God” figure was choreographing

our fates like a master of string puppets. But, following his experience in World War II,

he was faced with similar Joban questions. Why did Vonnegut survive the bombing of
 3

Dresden while tens of thousands perished? Why do terrible things happen to innocent

people? Why not me? Why them?

Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegutʼs attempt to, like Job, answer these questions

or, at least, to come to terms with them:

Vonnegut, as a rational atheist, derives no such consolation from the

answers of traditional faith. He can and does, however, find some
consolation in accepting an imperfect world . . . Pointing to this human
penchant for self-destruction through war and brutality becomes part of
Vonnegutʼs role as a latter-day Joban messenger who brings the news of
the commonness of death (Morse 83).

As a converse to the story of Job, Vonnegut asserts that there is no “just and

fair” God figure behind the scenes, doling out a portion of heartache here and a ration

of glory there. Rather, the characters in Slaughterhouse-Five are subject only to the

whims of human cruelty and of a catastrophic, inexplicable fate. Returning home from

World War II, Vonnegut found the tragic events in Dresden truly beyond

comprehension, and that “although he could share interesting stories about the war

and the comradery he experienced, that he failed again and again to find the right

words with which to describe the massacre, its aftermath, and its meaning--if

any” (Morse 80).

However, in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim does succeed in finding the right

words to describe Dresden (and most other undesirable outcomes for that matter): So

it goes.

So it goes. The novelʼs flagrant phrase is the Tralfamadorian mantra meant to

answer all of humanityʼs tough questions. The fictitious extraterrestrial breed, who

teach Billy in the ways of time travel and life itself, posit that the progression of time
 4

actually exists all at once, unchanging, and thus leaves us no control over events that

take place at any point in time. Visually, the moments of our lives can be looked upon

like a “stretch of the Rocky Mountains” but within them, we are but “bugs trapped in

amber” (Vonnegut 109).

“So it goes” is a way of life for Billy Pilgrim. It is a mode, both for Billy and for

Vonnegut, through which to explain occurrences that are otherwise inexplicable, notes

science fiction expert Willis E. McNelly:

And so it goes. The phrase becomes incantory; these are the magic
words that exorcise, enchant, stoicize. They are repeated by Vonnegut
and echoed by Pilgrim to convince Earthlings of Tralfamadorian fourth-
dimensional reality. The words become a fatalistic chant, a dogmatic
utterance, to permit Vonnegut himself to endure. In creating Tralfamadore,
Vonnegut is suggesting that cyclic time or the eternal present will enable
himself and mankind to accept the unacceptable. The sin of Dresden is so
great that it will require an eternity to expiate. But eternity is not available
to all men---only to the Tralfamadorians and the Pilgrim soul of man, and
Vonnegut has, out of his science-fiction heritage, created both (126).

So what about this “Pilgrim soul of man”? Everything was beautiful, and nothing

hurt. Free from sorrow, loss, grievance. Free from responsibility, maturity, guilt. It

appears to be quite a serene manner in which to live. But as Vonnegut reveals to us

throughout the course of Slaughterhouse-Five, living within the Tralfamadorian

dimension comes with a price.

Billy is not only apathetic towards his experience in Dresden; he is entirely

numb to life in general. Without the concept of free will, he is no longer held

accountable for any of his actions or the things which act upon him. Concerning war

and explosions and murders and massacres, this may be all fine and well, but a lack

of free will strips meaning from every aspect of human life. Motivation,
 5

accomplishment, responsibility, love---all of these diminish when one longer feels as

though one has any influence over the course of his or her own life.

The reality of death is no longer unnerving, but life itself is of no real concern,

either. Billy finds out exactly when and where he will be murdered, but does nothing to

stop it. His son grows up to fight in Vietnam and Billy, despite the horrors he

witnessed in war, expresses no real concern over his sonʼs well-being nor offers any

words of warning. He does not love his unsightly wife--never loved her--yet asks her to

marry him anyways and showers her with expensive presents until she dies. An

arrogant war historian, Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, asks Billy what it was like to be

on the ground during the Dresden bombing, to which he replies, “It was all right...

Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on

Tralfamadore” (Vonnegut 254).

Billy becomes a mere passenger, letting apathy steer the dim-lit roads of his

ordinary, bleak fate. Another of his ironic life mottos--“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”--is tinged with dark humor at the narratorʼs comment that

“Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the

future” (Vonnegut 77). Billy in fact rests his laurels upon the first line of his motto--“God

grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”-- and chooses to find

solace in the fact that he cannot change anything at all. Everything was beautiful, and

nothing hurt.

Overall, the Tralfamadorian concept has dangerous implications within human

society. If there is no guilt and no innocence, and if there is no difference between

 6

“right” and “wrong”, then what principle is left to stop us all from committing horrible

acts against one another? (Morse 85) This is the very dilemma that Vonnegut explores

in Slaughterhouse-Five, aiming for readers to begin raising these moral questions on

their own accord. The Tralfamadorians serve as a foreign lens, a different perspective

and set of values through which to analyze the ways in which we “explain away”

horrific moments in our human history. While the Tralfamadorians “spend eternity

looking at pleasant moments” Vonnegut sees them all, for better or for worse

(Vonnegut 150). His emphasis lends a saliency of consequence to the reader, writes

Dolores K. Gros Louis:

his writing of the novel with its overt pacifism show[s] that for him
everything is not all right. Unlike the Tralfamadorians, Vonnegut the
narrator looks back at many horrible moments: the destruction of Sodom
and Gomorrah, the drowning or enslavement of the thousands of children
in the Childrenʼs Crusade, the 1760 devastation of Dresden by the
Prussians, the extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazis, the
firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the bombing of
North Vietnam, the napalm burning of the Vietnamese, the assassination
of Robert Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the daily
body count from Vietnam (173-74).

Vonnegut, in one of the sparse passages in which he directly addresses the

reader of behalf of himself, clearly asserts his own opinion about “horrible moments”

within the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five. His moral standpoint is a far cry from

“so it goes”:

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part
in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill
them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for
companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for
people who think we need machinery like that” (Vonnegut 25).
 7

This stand-alone excerpt is one of the most important to note in

Slaughterhouse-Five. In this passage, Vonnegutʼs opinion on the Tralfamadorian farce

is revealed. He is aware that his sons have the free will to participate or not to

participate in inhumane acts; he, too, has the free will to instruct them not to do so. We

are not just “the listless playthings of enormous forces”, but human beings capable of

values and capable of change (Vonnegut 208).

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “So far as man thinks, he is free” (23). Indeed,

American transcendentalists such as Emerson largely rejected the popular

deterministic views of their time (which may be understood in conjunction with the

Tralfamadorian view that everything that there is has already been planned). Rather,

they claimed that man possessed a certain moral voice which, if you will,

“transcended” societal convention. It also transcended prediction: transcendentalists

placed more weight upon oneʼs conscience than the cause-and-effect model of time.

Also key to this moral code was oneʼs absolute individualism within it, and freedom to

exercise it (Westbrook 196).

I believe that Vonnegut would agree with the existence of this moral code, and

along with it a certain moral obligation. Slaughterhouse-Five is nothing less than

Vonnegutʼs plea to humanity to meet this obligation. A plea to be aware, to remember,

to think, to change, and most importantly, to always ask questions.

 8

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Conduct of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904.

Luis, Dolores K. Gros. “The Ironic Christ Figure in Slaughterhouse-Five.” Biblical

Images in Literature. Ed. Roland Bartel. Nashville: Abington Press, 1975.

161-175.

McNelly, Willis E. “Science Fiction: The Modern Mythology.” America 5 September

1970: 125-27.

Morse, Donald E. The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American.

Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003.

The New International Version Bible (NIV Bible). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five or The Childrenʼs Crusade: A Duty-Dance With

Death. New York: Dell Publishing, 1969.

Westbrook, Perry D. Free Will and Determinism in American Literature. Cranbury:

Associated University Presses, 1979.