Kurt Vonneguts surreal novel, Slaughterhouse-5 is filled to the brim with death.

Individuals
perish and whole masses of people are wiped out. So it goes, says Billy Pilgrim as he
blithely shrugs off each event as if it were a fly on his hand. In particular, it is the occasion of
Billy surviving the plane rash wherein the rest of his optometrist colleagues perished and its
triggering the events of his wifes death and the night he is capture by the Tralfamadorians
(an event that was most likely a hallucination from the head injury sustained from the crash)
that reveals the fatalistic message of the novel.
Despite the scene of death not imparting much significance in of itself, the fact that it
directly results in the loss of Billys wife by carbon monoxide poisoning and Billys descent
into his own fractured psyche leading to the Tralfamadorian revelations grated to Billy
conveys a sense of inevitability and shows the futility of free will. No matter where Billy
travels in his timeline, he will always be surrounded by death. There is no why because
Billy realizes the Tralfamadorians are right, the past, present, and future all exist
simultaneously. Without the pivotal plane crash and the resulting head injury (which, when
viewed from an objective lens is the most likely culprit coupled with the post-war PTSD for
Billys fantastical journey to Tralfamadore), Billy would never relies that indeed, all death is
rendered insignificant and nonsensical because it is but an inevitable, unalterable state of
being.
In the grand scheme of things, it is Billys acceptance of the Tralfamadorian dogma
that results in a more profound revelation. In showing such a weak, pathetic character
accepting his fate as something set in stone, Vonnegut cleverly implies that life is indeed not
pre-determined. Throughout the novel, So it goes taunts the reader with a sense of
dissatisfaction with death. Billy shouldve died in Dresden, in the plane crash, and so on. It is
his dedication to submit to the throes of circumstance that keeps him alive, but degrades his
appreciation and reverence for human life. This pits him ideologically against the likes of

Lazarro who is strong in his resolve to get revenge and defies fate to assassinate Billy. In the
end, Billy is unsatisfying as a character, whereas Lazarro fulfils a goal and takes death into
his own hand s and provides a point to his life and actions. In the creation of this foil,
Vonnegut reminds us that existence is a state of accepting what is as Billy does, as well as
having the will to change what can be changed as Lazarro does in killing Billy.