The Motif of Predestination in the Novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

Nefedova Ol'ga Igorevna ORCID: 0000-0002-4400-819X PhD in Philology Associate Professor; Institute of Foreign Languages; Moscow City Pedagogical University 105064, Russia, Moscow, Maly Kazenny lane, 5B, room 254 olgonaftik@yandex.ru

The main theme of the work of the American writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007) concerns the dichotomy of the problem of predestination and free will. In the writer's novels, as a rule, we are talking about characters who struggle with the realization that they cannot fully control their fate. The idea that life is predetermined and cannot be changed is not new and, in particular, is characteristic of mythological consciousness. However, in the novel "Slaughter House number Five" (Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, 1969), the predestination motive is one of the ways the human psyche copes with awareness and acceptance of the experience of a painful past. In his novel, Kurt Vonnegut attempts to analyze whether predestination is an expedient philosophy of life and what alternatives can be offered to it. Not all approaches to how a person interprets reality are effective for the prosperity of mankind. That is why, for example, "within the framework of postmodernism, the understanding of intertextuality is transformed into a technique for constructing a literary text" ^{[16, p. 574]} in order to reflect different interpretations of the phenomena considered in the text and points of view on the problem.

The novel "Massacre number Five" is generally recognized as a reference work of postmodern and anti-war prose ^{[7, pp. 180-181]} and tells about a soldier of the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim, who is captured by the Nazis and barely survives the bombing of Dresden by the Allies (Bombing of Dresden, 1945). Years later, Billy the optometrist, at the age of 45, is kidnapped by a flying saucer and taken to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is placed in a zoo for the entertainment of aliens capable of perceiving the entire space-time continuum at the same time. However, the American writer begins his novel about Dresden not from the point of view of his character, but himself as the narrator of his story and bases the plot on his own wartime experience. Like Billy, Vonnegut was drafted into World War II. So he ended up in Europe and was captured after the offensive in the Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge, December 1944 – January 1945) in southwestern Belgium. As a prisoner, he was thrown into an underground slaughterhouse in Dresden. His imprisonment in inhumane conditions allowed him to survive the bombing. An attempt to describe the author's reaction to these events becomes the starting point of writing a novel.

Kurt Vonnegut's main characters are usually direct projections of some part of his psyche, which allows him to explore his own internal conflicts, and minor characters often embody other diverse fragments of his personality: "Vonnegut's main characters are usually straightforward projections of some part of his psyche, and they let him work out his inner conflicts; minor characters often embody other fragments of his personality" ^{[5, p. 177]}. The analyzed text is a story about Billy Pilgrim, which unfolds inside the narrator's memory, which is in the novel authored by Kurt Vonnegut: "a story within a memory within a novel" ^{[3, p. 233]}. All this reflects the complex multi-layered structure of the psyche, which creates projection characters and tries to protect itself from painful memories, but nevertheless somehow tell about them.

This text shows the psychological impact of time, death, and uncertainty on the main character, or rather on the narrator Kurt Vonnegut: "the psychological impact of time, death, and uncertainty on its main character" ^{[3, p. 228]}. One voice is not able to function simultaneously in the three modes necessary to recreate all aspects of the disaster: 1. analytical and artistic description; 2. empathy for the suffering endured by the victims; and 3. personal reaction, namely psychological destruction, indicating the impact that watching atrocities has on a sensitive and humane person ^{[5, p. 179]}. Critics often perceive Billy's reaction as Vonnegut's reaction. A more accurate approach would be to consider the system of characters in the novel "Slaughterhouse number Five" as components of a single psyche. Together they create a complex and contradictory reaction of one mind to the Dresden experience. This combination of perspectives allows Vonnegut to present Dresden in a multidimensional way. At the same time, it is Billy Pilgrim who considers all events in life as predetermined, and, therefore, it is through the image of this character that the motive of predestination in the novel manifests itself.

Predestination plays an important role in American culture and literature. It is known that "throughout the XVII century. faith in predestination was absolute for the inhabitants of the North American colonies. At that time, the colonists completely denied any chance of what was happening. However, over time, the idea of providence begins to weaken" ^{[10, pp. 8-9]}. Due to the rejection of the theological paradigm and the reorientation towards man as the center of the universe, interest in the subjective perception of reality is characteristic of representatives of modernism and postmodernism. In particular, predestination is often the focus of science fiction literature. The researchers note that "significant aspects of the doctrine of predestination are the punishment and salvation of mankind, the intervention of Higher Powers, the election of some people compared to others, sinfulness and righteousness. They are often found in works of fiction, <...> because their characters, traditionally placed in conditions of disaster or the end of the world, are trying to survive and get used to a new reality" ^{[11, p. 9]}. The writer closely connects predestination with the category of time. Thus, the images of aliens from the planet Tralfamador first appear in the novel by the writer "Sirens of Titan" (The Sirens of Titan, 1959) and develop this theme throughout the author's work. The writer contrasts an alternative, non-linear understanding of time with an ordinary, linear one associated with scientific development and progress. According to the Tralfamadorians, time is not linear, but synchronous. Everything that has happened or will happen exists in the eternal present. According to the Tralfamadorians, history is a series of random events that have no final meaning. The four-dimensional perception of time by the Tralfamadorians is similar to F.'s interpretation. Aquinas dichotomy of predestination and free will. What happens to people at different times is real to God. Therefore, the event that may occur is not the future, but is happening now. Thus, God does not have foresight in the sense in which people define him, but rather has knowledge of the so-called unchangeable present. If we replace "Tralfamadorians" with "God" in F. Aquinas' arguments on this issue, the meaning will be the same. Things that happen at different times for people, for Tralfamadorians, are in the present, just as F. Aquinas claimed that the Lord perceives everything at the same time, at once, and not in the future.

The main character of "Massacre number Five" comes to accept the predestination of being through a kind of "revelation" about the nature of time, which is associated in the novel "with the complete denial of the category of time, since the possibility of change, interaction, comparison is rejected" ^{[17, p. 201]}. The concept of cyclical history is not new, as is time travel in fiction in general, but their connection and chaotic random movement through time is Vonnegut's own contribution to literature. What Vonnegut creates is, to a certain extent, a reflection of the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). A person is not only free to move arbitrarily through time, but his internal structures of the psyche are formed under the influence of the outside world through memory, in which, according to Bergson, time resides. Bergson hypothesizes that consciousness can encompass many events widely spaced in one instantaneous perception ^{[2, p. 45]}. However, unlike the reflections of ancient philosophers, what is meant here is the perception of time by the human psyche. In a somewhat similar way, Billy Pilgrim denies the existence of a chronological order – both the past and the future have already come, and therefore, paradoxically, fate does not exist.

The novel "Slaughterhouse number Five" is a study of two approaches to life that the Pilgrim keeps in his mind – Tralfamadorianism and Christianity: «an inquiry into the two opposed philosophies that Pilgrim holds in his mind — Tralfamadorianism and Christianity» ^{[8, p. 47]}. Both points of view on time deny freedom of will and the ability of people to change their fate in different ways, because it is already predetermined, which means that humanity is powerless to influence the course of events. The aliens allow their test pilot to press a button, even though they know it will destroy the universe. According to this logic, the bombing of Dresden was inevitable, regardless of whether Dresden was destroyed by the will of God, or, as the aliens interpret it, the moment is simply "so structured": "We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears. So it goes. “If you know this,” said Billy, “isn’t there some way you can prevent it? Can't you keep the pilot from pressing the button?” “He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way”» ^{[9, p. 149]}. This explanation comes from the fact that "the extreme rationalization of time creates such a rigid and pure structure of space that, according to Billy Pilgrim, free will is impossible in it" ^{[14, p. 182]}. And this structure is determined through place and time. The Tralfamadorians are the cause of the death of the universe, but "rationo does not see himself in the spatial structure that he creates by excluding himself into a position of non-occurrence. The reason is rather the structure itself" ^{[14, p. 182]}. They are, as it were, "disconnected" from place and time, and therefore, with the help of an artistic technique of detachment, they take the position of an observer, which offers the possibility of emotional detachment and analysis of their fate by the character as a pure structure outside the space-time continuum and context. Thus, the predestination motive is associated with alienation from the characters' memories and emotions, which gives rise to a feeling of meaninglessness of any decisions or actions.

In this vein, meeting with aliens and "time travel <...> it can be interpreted as its protective mechanism against the long-term destructive influence of memories of the bombing of Dresden and being in a concentration camp" ^{[17, p. 200]}. Billy obviously suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As researchers V.E. Belyaeva and G.V. Streltsova note, "what was previously considered within the framework of postmodern aesthetics: eclecticism of images, fragmented narrative, oscillation of plot tension, famous experiments with space and time, irony and intertextuality rich in meanings – in the modern state of literary science can fully serve as a justification for a different approach to studying a kind of author's method: from the standpoint of the theory of trauma" ^{[12, p. 78]}. As you know, it is difficult for people suffering from PTSD to avoid psychological stimuli – both internal and external factors that cause a reaction and are associated with trauma. Certain triggers cause the appearance of involuntary obsessive memories of an alarming nature. A person feels as if a past event is happening again, sometimes to the point of complete loss of awareness of the surrounding reality (MSD Handbook. The professional version. URL: https://www.msdmanuals.com/). All the movements in time and space of Billy Pilgrim are associated with certain incidents in his life, especially in the war, which constitute the very incentives. So, Kurt Vonnegut seems to build different moments from the main character's life around a single landmark or stimulus, creating a more complex structure of the character's experience and thereby also the narrative. All this is reminiscent of how memory actually works.

Billy lives in Bergson's world of pure internal time or duration (durée), and external stimuli only evoke a response in his memory ^{[6, p. 70]}. For example, the first time jump occurs when he is on a train in Germany. This train was marked with a striped banner in orange and black: "a striped banner of orange and black" ^{[9, p. 88]}, meaning that prisoners of war were being carried in it. Colors as a stimulus evoke a response in Billy's memory, and he moves through them on his daughter's wedding day under a striped tent of the same colors ^{[9, p. 91]}. The same reaction can be seen when Billy describes sleeping prisoners, him and his wife, and the bodies of dead Americans ("nestled like spoons" ^{[9, p. 90, 91, 161, 183]}). Such repetitive details are landmarks that allow the reader to follow the course of the narrative and build disparate fragments of Billy's life around them.

What happened in the war haunts Billy even more than his own death, which he also sees several times. In Vonnegut's novels, life is a state of gradual but eternal destruction. This is evident from the various repetitive elements that permeate the text. For example, the author associates death with ice, frozen water, the smell of mustard gas and roses, the colors blue and ivory, indicating death and mortality. Time, which inevitably leads to death, is the real enemy of Vonnegut's character (and therefore, including the feeling of predestination of being). Death seems too real to exclude it from the reinterpreted universe, but by changing the nature of time, Vonnegut deprives death of its sting: "Time since it leads inevitably to death—is the real enemy of Vonnegut-as-character. Death seems too real for Vonnegut to omit from his reinvented cosmos, but by reinventing the nature of time, Vonnegut deprives death of its sting» ^{[3, p. 238]}. Vonnegut's telling of his story as a character is an attempt by the author to cope with his traumatic experiences, feelings about death and the uncertainty of life through manipulations with time that change attitudes towards death and fate. To do this, the writer resorts to the fragmentation of time, structures the life of the main character in such a way as to present the absurdity of war and its negative impact on the human psyche.

Under the guidance of the Tralfamadorians, Billy tries to cope with the memories of his Dresden experience. On Tralfamador, the main character learns that all moments of the past, present and future have always existed, will always exist, which means that when a person dies, he only seems to be dead because he is still alive in his past. He is dead at this particular moment, but feels great at many other times: ""The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore," says Billy, "was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist <…> When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments”» ^{[9, p. 33-34]}. With this approach to fate and avoidance as a way of psychological protection, characters reduce personal involvement and emotional reaction towards any of its events, happy or tragic. In this case, the tragedy does not cause such severe pain, but happiness is also a joy. Thus, the tenets of Tralfamadorianism contain remedies for pain and suffering.

However, the narrator Vonnegut does not write the book in order to avoid memories of the past, but rather to tell about it. A kind of journey into the past means for Vonnegut an encounter with the most emotionally charged event for him – the bombing of Dresden. Dresden, as a point in time and space, embodies for Vonnegut the inevitability and omnipresence of death, therefore it is an event around which everything is built in the text. American researcher P. K. Alken (P. K. Alkon) notes that Americans were and remain more inclined than Europeans to identify geographical location with time and, consequently, spatial travel with time. Americans crossing the Atlantic Ocean eastward to Europe are also actually visiting their collective past: "Americans crossing the Atlantic eastward to Europe <...> are also in effect visiting their collective past» ^{[1, p. 120]}. Consequently, the hero of the novel "Slaughterhouse number Five" also makes a journey both through his individual memory and within the collective, revising the already established ideas about the past.

The deterministic way of thinking is often found and used as a tool in times of war. The social appeal of Tralfamadorianism is obvious: it frees humanity from responsibility and moral actions. If everything is predetermined, if there is no point in changing anything, then no one can be responsible for anything. The Tralfamadorian idea that there is nothing we can do fully justifies Billy's apathy. Tralfamador symbolizes the collective oblivion of World War II, which was facilitated by the accelerated development of consumer culture in the United States. The aliens actually set out the post-war philosophy of consumption: you should focus on the good events and forget about the bad ones, which is what a visitor to the Tralfamadorian zoo suggests. The aliens can't do anything about their terrible wars, so they just choose to ignore them and spend eternity contemplating the pleasant moments: "we have wars as terrible as any you've ever seen or read about. There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don't look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments-like today at the zoo» ^{[9, p. 150]}. The wealthy optometrist Billy obviously believes that owning objects and attractive women will make him forget his past and become happy. However, the whole plot of the novel rests on the fact that Billy cannot forget the war and its horrors. His carefree life doesn't seem to give him any real comfort or salvation. Despite the material comfort, Billy is constantly immersed in his unpleasant past.

Throughout the novel, the author associates his character with "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1678, 1684) by John Bunyan (1628-1688) and with the story of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ: «Now his snoozing became shallower as he heard a man and a woman speaking German in pitying tones. The speakers were commiserating with somebody lyrically. Before Billy opened his eyes, it seemed to him that the tones might have been those used by the friends of Jesus when they took His ruined body down from His cross» ^{[9, p. 250]}. In the above passage, Billy's body is compared to the body of Christ, which is removed from the cross, which symbolically means that the hero is also innocent and, nevertheless, goes through pain and suffering. After being kidnapped in 1967 by the Tralfamadorians, Billy the optometrist takes on the role of the messiah: «He was doing nothing less now, he thought, than prescribing corrective lenses for earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy believed, because they could not see as well as his little green friends on Tralfamadore» ^{[9, p. 36]}. He now assigns "corrective glasses" for the souls of earthlings and tries to change their focus of attention and view of the world in order to save them from pain and suffering.

Vonnegut created a parody of Christ, whose gospel is Tralfamadorian. When Billy preaches this dogma, he does a great service to already apathetic people by confirming their position and providing a philosophical basis for their indifference. Billy's overwhelming sense of his own helplessness is something that modern Americans continue to justify: "Billy's overwhelming sense of his own helplessness is something contemporary Americans continue to validate" ^{[8, p. 48]}. In Slaughterhouse Five, there is very little difference between the will of God and the will of chance. For Vonnegut, blind faith in an almighty Creator involved in guiding human history has led to great troubles: accepting war as God's will and that God is certainly on the side of the Americans, which means that the cruelty that is taking place is inevitable and predetermined. The concept of American exceptionalism reflected in this way has its origins in the views of the Puritans of the early colonial period, which largely formed the basis of US culture as a whole, which easily resonates with Americans.

Billy's problem is that being traumatized by the past does not allow the character to separate the past from the present and the future, so he reacts painfully to any triggers associated with these memories, which he is not ready to talk about. Moreover, "the category of time is devoid of semantic content for Billy, since he cannot reliably correlate his life experience in the temporal plane. The hero does not feel the logical connection between events, the order between them" ^{[18, p. 202]}, which generates his emotional instability and at the same time highlights the absurdity of the reality in which he exists. All this correlates with the fact that "absurdism has become, if not an answer, then an attempt to comprehend the horrors of the Second World War, which exposed the variability of values and the meaninglessness of human existence" ^{[15, p. 135]}. Literature and art reflect how an entire generation of people experience similar intense emotional experiences, which affects subsequent generations. "The intergenerational transmission of mental trauma is caused by alienation, loss of roots, rupture of family ties, and, as a result, life in a new time, where the illusion of well-being suddenly turns into loneliness and guilt" ^{[13, p. 128]}. Billy's relationship with his own children Barbara and Robert is characterized in a similar way. And despite the fact that the war has thoroughly shaken Billy's fortune, he does not show enough determination and reflection to condemn her or dissuade his own son from participating in the Vietnam War.

It is worth adding that memory, according to Bergson, preserves the past and allows for a difference in present experience. For example, we may experience similar events, but the circumstances may be different, or we may react to them differently. This difference provides the freedom with which we can choose and create, which Billy Pilgrim does not understand. Thus, we can conclude that the main character of the novel is in an unusual time loop, the movement of which he does not control in any way, but this view of the world allows him to avoid painful emotions and awareness of meaninglessness, which he perceives as a benefit that needs to be spread among other people. And this apparent calmness is indifference to moral issues, which is ultimately the reason for events such as the bombing of Dresden.

In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to change the position from an indifferent observer to one who believes in the possibility of free will and is ready to transform the reality around him. "The experience of 'all-being' is equivalent to being lost: Billy Pilgrim has seen his birth and his death many times, but he does not know who he "really is"" ^{[14, p. 183]}. He does not know whether he is young or old, a soldier or an optometrist, because he does not understand what really makes up his present, due to the fact that he is constantly being carried into the past or the future. As his name implies, Billy is doomed to an eternal pilgrimage to the moments that define him. He, like a ghost, witnesses death over and over again. However, Billy does not perceive any of the experiences he has experienced as his own, but as simply "existing", so he feels an inner emptiness: "Had not assumed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was» ^{[9, p. 221]}. When an experience is denied by a person, for him these events do not constitute his identity, but if everything is denied to the same extent, the person turns into nothing for himself and, as it were, "dies", ceases to exist.

However, the American author also offers an alternative for humanity. Indian scientists call the K approach. Vonnegut's "biblical humanism", based on personal and individualized acts of love and charity: "personal and individualized acts of love and charity" ^{[4, p. 88]}. In the novel under study, through the use of prayer in the text (the Serenity Prayer), another philosophy of life is proposed:

«GOD GRANT ME

THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT

THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE

COURAGE

TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,

AND WISDOM ALWAYS

TO TELL THE

DIFFERENCE»

^{[9, p. 77]}.

Vonnegut realizes that people should calmly accept those things that they cannot change – the past, linear time, aging, death, natural forces. In a sense, this approach is similar to the philosophy of Buddhism, in which the most important aspect is the acceptance of the fact that suffering is a natural part of our lives. Suffering comes from the fact that people become too attached to sensual pleasures and short-lived things of the outside world that are beyond their control, but do not appreciate what they already have right now. The prayer also states that there are things that can be changed with the help of moral courage, but the Tralfamadorian vision of the world lacks this quality. While Billy believes that he cannot change the past, present or future, Vonnegut argues that in the arena of the vast present, we can, with courage, achieve change: "And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep» ^{[9, p. 23]}. Vonnegut-the character here compares the present with the river (as opposed to the immovable ice of the past) and asks questions about how wide and deep the river of the present moment is and what part of it belongs to him – what is his degree of responsibility for those events and actions that are committed here and now. This is how he tries to delineate the boundaries between uncontrolled reality and himself, with the help of which he can gain wisdom and understand who he really is and what he should be responsible for.

Courage lies in the fact that in the face of chaos, death and uncertainty, a person is able to react and make efforts to resolve events and situations that others tend to ignore or forget. In order to know what can be changed, you need to know the reality around you and yourself better. "The characters' appeal to their inner essence becomes the beginning of both spiritual change and their inner growth" ^{[18, p. 1372]}. Thus, the feeling of agency (the ability to act) is important for the resilience of individuals. Otherwise, faith in predestination leads to a loss of confidence in one's own abilities and capabilities, susceptibility to manipulation, inability to take responsibility for one's actions and the destruction of the human personality as such.

Thus, the motive of "predestination" in K. Vonnegut's novel "Massacre number Five" is a reaction of the psyche of a person traumatized by war and other painful events, who travels through the time loop of his memories and cannot control this process, including due to a strong rejection of death. The way to deal with this is the philosophy of aliens from the planet Tralfamador, who make themselves observers of events outside of time and space and support the main character's belief that no one can change anything, which leads to dulling feelings, passivity and indifference. However, this is countered by Vonnegut, a character who is trying to accept his own past. In terms of subjective perception, the process of searching for one's true self, according to Vonnegut, involves distinguishing between the past, present and future and taking responsibility for what a person is able to control.