Finding In Death Life’s Lost Essence

Writing an anti-war book, as explained in the previous chapter, is as ineffective as writing an anti-glacier. Commonly, death is seen as a feared and discriminated character, which is feared by everyone but Billy Pilgrim. “Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes’” (Vonnegut, 27). This shrug appears in the context of the story every time the narrator mentions a death, which on most of the cases is pretty ironic: Billy being the only survivor of a plane crash, his father’s hunting accident, and his wife’s accidental poisoning of carbon monoxide, which lead us back to believe that writing an anti-war book is as ineffective as stopping death. But curiously, Billy is the only one who survives all the failed attempts death has on him. Death to him is not the end of the path, because his life is not a path as those of every human being. When he “dies”, he transports into another moment of his life, passing through death and prebirth: living again.

Billy’s perception of time makes the reader already know the beginning, middle, and end of his story. Hence, the book’s and Billy’s path is not linear, but irregular because it doesn’t follow the traditional sketch of living our lives heading towards death. He constantly dies, making him “unplottable” on the author’s outline about the events of the story. “One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle… and the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the yellow line was dead. And so on” (Vonnegut, 5). Supposing Billy’s line is yellow, it would be “unplottable” because his death is his birth and his end is just his beginning. Due to the fact of Billy being “unstuck” in time, the reader has no real notion of the past, present, or future, and consequently no beginning, or end. By “dying”, Billy becomes omniscient of the events occurring to him at the present while he dives into his memories and foreshadows.

Since the reader is sensing the story through Billy Pilgrim’s experience, the reader gets to see death as the most tragic part of war itself. As Billy lives all these deaths throughout the chapter, death becomes directly related to war. Death is death and war is war, which leads us to believe that, ironically enough, war and peace are interdependent: there cannot be war without peace and peace without war. Similarly, the story’s protagonist Billy is depicted as an antiwar hero due to the fact there is a war. There are no heroes without villains, and even the most horrific and beautiful aspects of war are useless in the presence of death, leading us to the same ending: the eternal singing of birds.

The story of Billy in War can be represented through the method of sink-or-swim: “His father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim… he lost consciousness… sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that” (Vonnegut, 44). Billy prefers sinking to swimming, because when you sink you lose consciousness and then its gone. When you sink you die and don’t have to strive to continue life’s rough path, as it is swimming. Billy’s indignity as a soldier and the horrible events that constantly swing into his life make him accept death, and not fear it, making the reader believe that in live there are far worst things that death: “You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping” (Epic Of Gilgamesh). Maybe Billy found in death that little thing he never found in life.