No More War

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Concluding Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut makes his literary intentions clear: to denounce war and its horrible consequences.  In narrating Billy Pilgrim's descent into madness and partial recovery when recounting his tale of the Dresden bombings, Vonnegut personifies these consequences.  War traumatized Billy, leaving him in a state of mental disarray.  It desensitized him and the world he lived in to the idea of death as a necessary means to an end.  This desensitization manifests glaringly in the Tralfamadorian saying, "So it goes" (Vonnegut 210).  Instead of feeling pity and sorrow for the deceased, Billy explains early on that Tralfamadorians meet death the simple phrase "So it goes" to show how death is meaningless because all moments in time are essentially the same moment (Vonnegut 210).  There is one singular state of existence through which time does not pass, but simply is.  The narrator, which I believe champions Vonnegut's personal political views, displays aversion to this phrase.  He states, "If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed," (Vonnegut 211).   He dislikes the idea of life being meaningless and there being no greater purpose than to exist and have existed.  Therefore, Vonnegut, through the narrator, condemns war for eliciting this perspective on life.