I like to believe that death isn’t inevitable after all, that I can grab at my fate from the bottom through goodness and prayer and faith. Without this delusion, where would I be? Where would any of us be? Would I have the will to wake up in the morning, to do good things, to respect my math teachers, to brush my teeth and cry for the wounded and poor? If I weren't tyrranized by the fear of my own death and insulated from the acceptance of it, would I be gloomy and fatalist, or would I be liberated?
According to be me, self-ordained pre-emminent existential scholar, Othello, The Stranger and Slaughterhouse-Five answer this question by tracing the maturation of the human consciousness from fabricating control – measuring out fate in precise quantities, carefully planning its progression and systematically altering its composition – to accepting death, to filling the void when delusions fall to the wayside.
The epiphanic moment – the fulcrum on which existential though revolves – is the acceptance of death.
It is said that no man can take seriously the possibility of his own death. Perhaps, he cannot accept death because cannot understand nothingness and he is fantastically frighten of that which he cannot understand. Perhaps, he cannot accept death because it disposes of carcases indiscriminately, inevitably, and the virtue he so meticulously ascribes to actions – his precise categorization of immorality and morality, of good and bad, of wicked and pure – is no longer relevant in the cold soil six feat beneath the surface. As an ultimate fate of all individuals, death is an ultimate equalizer. Those empty inevitable moments of silence are shared by both great and small, strong and weak, businessmen and drunkards. Perhaps he cannot accept death because, in accepting the inescapable, he must accept that he has no control over his fate, no role in his final destination and no purpose in his existence.
It is said that to cure himself of his loneliness and fright, he dreams up fairy-tales of powerful wizards and ghosts that give great cosmic significance to his actions. They tell him that all his actions are premises in a grand metaphysical conclusion, that his life is measured on a scale and his soul is judged with the legal wisdom of Solomon. When there is a lovely destination like this, like a rolling stone down a sloping hill, actions lead to reactions, premises lead to conclusions, badness to redemption and goodness to salvation. Life has a purpose.
It is said that man fetishizes on control because in fact he has none, that he obsesses over logic and virtue and worldly importance because in fact, there is little of it. He is terrified of his own death, the irrevocable tropism of all life towards decline, decay and destruction, so he exalts his life to a realm relevance because he is just too scared not to. What if this familiar narrative of fear, faith and hope were not inevitable? What would life without a destination mean?
Progressing from the premise that death is inevitable, the argument continues that life is meaningless. Do intervening actions really matter when they all lead to the same desination?
This theme is resoundingly reinforced through the contemplation of justice. Justice systems depend on logicality and causality; when God is rejected, death is accepted and purpose is strew in the wastebasket, then actions are nothing but singular absurdities strung together with time. All three books are trials in the courtroom of the absurd, where meaning does not matter and evidence is irrelevant.
Othello's ACT III progresses as a carnival courtroom, where Desdemona's guilt is substantiated through ephemeral symbol and obscure implication, and her defense only exacerbates the evidence against her in a crime she in fact did not commit: “Othello: The handkerchief! / Desdemona: I pray, talk me of Cassio / Othello: The handkerchief!” (159). Desdemona's nonsensical conviction underscores the senselessness of all actions.
Slaughterhouse-Five, at its core, is too a statement about justice. The constant barrage of imbecilic judgments, ironic deaths and absurd conclusions hints at a broader chaotic universe with no meaning, where death is all encompassing and nondiscriminant. The survival of a gangly, ill-equipped and untrained misfit who desperately wants nothing more than to die – in world where moral men and women who love life more than they love each other are unrelentingly annihilated without rhyme or reason – indicates a grand purposelessness to life and arbitrariness to death. “Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested and shot for plundering. He was tried and shot” (274). After a bombing of epic magnitudes, killing almost as many people as both atomic bombs put together, destroying almost everything and scaring the world into empty destitution, the trial, conviction and execution of a school teacher who took nothing but a teapot, is so broad an indictment of logicality and fairness that it calls into question any purpose in life whatsoever. To Vonnegut, “Poo-tee-weet?” is just about the most intelligent question to posit in the face of such inexplicable destruction. Billy Pilgrim, faced with these realities, has conclusively decided that no, there is no purpose.
When Meursault is on trial, the prosecutor asks, “'Why did you pause between the first and the second shot?'” (67). The question is impossible because the lawyer is attempting to impose his own system of logical analysis on a man who has rejected purpose or motivation or logic in any action. He is attempting to distill reason from absurdity. The question is impossible because, as the three books argue, there is no purpose in life and there is no justice in death.
Maybe the acceptance of death is not morbid, but liberating.
To Vonnegut's iconic antihero Billy Pigram, the antidote in a world of subjective truth and arbitrary morality, in a world defined as chaotic and absurd, ultimately barreling towards its own self-wrought destruction, is the simple appreciation of existence. The liberation mankind will achieve when he frees himself form the fear of death is tantamount to the escapement of the prisoner in Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave. Bound by the linearity of time, “All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn't know he was on a flatcar, didn't even know there was anything peculiar about his situation” (147). Like Plato's cave dwellers, humans see only shadows dancing on the walls, or dots at the end a twenty-foot pipe. It is only when we free ourselves from fixation on time can we appreciate the eternal beauty of the moment. Nietzsche famously wrote about the eternal reoccurrence of time:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'
The belief by Nietzsche, a father of existential thought, that the fundamental motivation of life should be the acceptance of death and the timeless and infinite visitation of the happiness and sadness of life, is wonderfully encapsulated in the advice administered by the Billy alien captors, “'That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they try hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good one” (150). Perhaps, in a world with no purpose other than death and no meaning beyond destruction, man does not need fairy-tales, grain alcohol and cable T.V. to succor the emptiness of his soul. No, he need only to heed the wisdom of the Tralfmadorians, to enjoying that which is good and relive that which is beautiful.
