It seems as though all we hear on the news lately is bad news. So it goes,
right? After all, if we took to heart all the tragedies that occur everyday in
the world we'd never get out of bed in the morning. We would have an overload of
grief so heavy that we'd probably all die of a broken heart. What we sometimes
forget is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Likewise, every time someone dies another is born. Every time a marriage ends in
divorce, a newlywed couple celebrates their honeymoon somewhere else in the
world. The world is in a constant state of renewal. So why do we only notice the
bad things? Probably because we're human. Even though the bulk of our problems
are self-inflicted or man-made, they still come as a shock to us nearly every
time. We have created an absurd time to live in. So now what? How do we deal
with it? How should we react to the horrors of war, heartache, and famine? Do we
try to solve our problems all at once, or do we sit back and watch things fall
apart? Kurt Vonnegut has an interesting idea of what to do, as is shown in his
novel, Slaughter House Five. Vonnegut's prescription for dealing with the tragic
absurdity of the twentieth century is to simply not deal with it. In his novel,
Vonnegut shows that he is more inclined to sit back and watch than to let things
effect him. Being an anti-war novel, his book is filled with shocking events and
gruesome deaths. But Vonnegut portrays death as something trivial. Every time
someone dies or something bad happens where the reader might think "oh my
gosh, that's awful!" Vonnegut says, "so it goes." It's as if he
saying that that kind of thing happens all the time and since no one can stop it
we shouldn't get all worked up about it. But he goes to the extent to make the
reader think he doesn't care. When he reacts this way up to four times in one
page, it's like he's suggesting we glaze over the horrible moments as if they
never really happened. Vonnegut's main character, Billy Pilgrim, has learned how
to glaze over bad times like this. He has become, as he says, "unstuck in
time," meaning his life is no longer in chronological order. It has become,
to him, a series of moments. As he learned from the Tralfamadorians, he is able
to time travel to any given moment in his life whenever he wants. Billy hasn't
yet learned how to choose what moment he travels to, but he seems to be able to
choose when he goes. He hops around from moment to moment as if he's flipping
channels on a TV. For example, he starts out talking to his daughter, and then
he gets in an argument with her and finds himself on Tralfamadore, where he is
being displayed in a "zoo" for the locals to observe. Then he finds
himself in bed with his wife on their honeymoon. When he gets up to look for the
bathroom, he finds himself as a prisoner of war looking for the latrine. When he
finds it, he sees that some of the other prisoners have become violently ill and
are writhing in pain. So it goes. He is then reminded of his stay in a veteran's
hospital and is transported there, where he has to listen to his roommate
complain about him as if he's not there. Then he finds himself on the bank of a
river being beaten in the snow, and hears the gunshots of two of his other
travel mates being shot. So it goes. Next he is being led through an underground
passage in Dresden, a city that will later be bombed, in which more people will
die than in the bombing of Hiroshima. So it goes. The story is broken up like
this throughout the novel. Every time Billy is in a bad situation he time
travels. Therefore he never really deals with the present situation. He ignores
his present situation instead. He's deciding to live in other moments in the
past and future. He's living in denial. Through this example Vonnegut seems to
be telling us that we don't need to put up with today's absurdities. We can live
in the past (or future) like Billy. A lot of people do this. They either dwell
in the past and aren't able to get over things that happened a long time ago, or
they have such a hard time dealing with the present that they choose to live in
denial and think everything is just how it has always been. This is a very
immature solution to handling the world's absurdities. We don't have the choice
to "flip the channels" in our lives like Billy does; however we often
flip the channel when the news comes on. But we can't just ignore our problems
and expect them to go away. That never works for anybody. Nor does denial, which
living in the past is, plain and simple. We have to deal with things in a more
mature way. As Vonnegut subtly points out, we have to help the things we can and
understand the things we can't, and hopefully we will never lose sight of the
difference.