Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut leads the reader to ask essential questions about human nature and society.Vonnegut’s methods are satirical elements, symbols, and the hero’s journey. The questions our group decided were most prevalent were “Why are human beings so selfish?” and “Why are mental illnesses not taken seriously?” After discussing the questions that arose from discussion over this book after talking about the questions we asked, it led us to this question “How does war affect individuals and society as a whole?”.
While reading this book it was clear that there are several examples of how Vonnegut makes the reader think about this question, “One of the main effects of the war after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters” (164). This is an example of how the war affected Billy and the people involved with the war alongside with him. In 1967, while Billy was on a plane going to an optometrists convention when the plane crashed into the top of Sugarbush Mountain, and everyone died except for Billy. “When Billy finally got home to Ilium after the airplane crash, he was quiet for a while. He had a terrible scar across the top of his skull. He didn’t resume practice. He had a housekeeper. His daughter came over almost every day.(25) Society and individuals need to learn how to help people with mental disabilities. People lack understanding of Billy, and need to learn to how to help. After war I feel soldiers just want to go home and not think about the war. Mostly though, they are forced to.
People, especially mentally healthy ones, tend to downplay other people’s suffering because oh, they’ve gone through worse, so that other people can’t possibly be suffering due to it. “[The hobo’s] last words were, ‘You think this is bad? This ain’t bad’”(79). He tells Billy that the soldiers’ problems were nonexistent, or close to it, because he’d had trials that he considered worse. He didn’t recognise that suffering is not a contest, and that what one person has gone through does not negate the troubles that others have. Billy’s daughter, Barbara thinks he is crazy because he was advertising this illusion of the Tralfamadorians over the radio, not even keying in the factor that he could possibly have a very severe mental disorder that needs treatment. But, instead, she just yells at him. Die Hasen!! is a song about how people run around like rabbits when they don’t know what to do. People don’t know how to deal with mental illness either overreact or continue to goof off and act like nothing is wrong. When Billy is in the hospital for the plane crash he had a roommate who was a past military leader with strong opinions. His name is Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, and he was in the hospital for breaking his leg while skiing with his fifth wife on their honeymoon. Rumfoord grew sick of Billy and constantly complained about him. “Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease”(192). Rumfoord got so sick of him he told the doctors and nurses that Billy had Echolalia and needed to be tested. “Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say.” (192) Rumfoord says Billy has Echolalia because Billy keeps talking about Dresden and how he was there when Dresden was blown to pieces.
Human beings are selfish. That is an indisputable fact, though many selfish people will try to convince you that they are not with the dreaded “Not all people!” And while it is true that some people are incredibly selfless, as a whole, our species has desires that we will attempt to fulfill, even at the expense of others. It is evident that selfishness is something that Vonnegut wants us to think about because it is a pressing issue throughout the book.