Slaughterhouse Five

After reading Kurt Vonnegut's antiwar novel, Slaughterhouse Five's protagonist, I applied Billy Pilgrim to my Big Q. Billy is an interested character to apply to this because he has no desire to be alive. All throughout the novel, he is degraded, dejected, and humiliated by those around him. In every career he takes, and even among his family, he is deprived of respect. He is constantly facing adversity, but he enters in to situations of adversity already unwilling to continue. Instead of being struck down by failure, he is already on the bottom. His encounters with the people and planet of  Tralfamadore and what he has witnessed in the war have contributed to his unwillingness to try. Earning respect and accomplishment-- be it in the ranks of war or among his family or in the professional field-- is meaningless because all will share the same death. Death is inevitable and inescapable and free will is a myth. Why try? Billy is merely a "listless plaything of enormous forces," he always has been and he always will be. He recognizes that among the things he cannot change are "the past, the present, and the future." In this case, in the face of adversity and failure, Billy does not succumb nor arise from it a better person. He remains belly up, subdued to the greater forces of fate, death, and time.