Why There Will Always Be War - Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

This book is a book that shows how absurd everything is. It starts with Billy Pilgrim, the main character. Billy is clearly not mentally stable. His narration is unreliable. His perspective of war is not to be trusted, is not rational. We’re seeing the war through his traumatized and confused point of view. But isn’t that the point? There is no rational perspective on war. It’s all absurd. War is human absurdism at its most extreme. It swallows up so many people, all at once. It takes away innocence and joy and life itself.

And yet... it’s unavoidable, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being unrealistic. We’re supposed to accept the things we can’t change, and war is one of those things. The two ends of the spectrum in Slaughterhouse-Five are: war is absurd and evil and, on the other end, free will doesn’t exist. War, in other words, is unavoidable no matter how many people agree that killing other people should be avoided. The story explores both those ends in a dizzying traversal back and forth across the life of a fictional man named Billy Pilgrim. The non-linear structure of the story is a representation of the extremes of the spectrum. There is no middle ground. There is no solution.

Maybe Billy never actually time travels. Maybe all his flash backs and flash forwards are actually episodes of PTSD. PTSD is a form of time travel. How does one process horrors that always existed (i.e. they were unavoidable) and always will (i.e. the memories are there, the event happened and always will have)? The way Billy processed was by inventing the Tralfamadorians to explain why he couldn't escape his past. No, he wasn’t in psychological turmoil. He was just unstuck in time. I’m sadly sure there are lots of people who suffer enough that they, too, would rather believe in aliens than in the horrors of their past, the horrors that exist in their minds and always will.

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