Themes By: Alex Kamareddine

The major theme of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, is fatalism, the role

fate plays in a person’s life and the connection free will has to that destiny. According

to Pilgrim’s Tralfamadorian guides there is no such thing as free will, everything is

predestined. “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will 

exist.” (P. 27) It is useless to struggle against fate . This is the reason Pilgrim comes

across as a passive character. “It is all right” said Billy “Everything is all right, and 

everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that in Tralfamadore.(P.198)

The Tralfamadorians tell Pilgrim that time does not exist in the way he thinks. Everything 

occurs simultaneously. Time is “...just an illusion we have here on Earth.”(P.27) “Among 

the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.(P. 

60). As one Tralfamadorian tells Pilgrim...”Only on Earth is there any talk of free will”.(P. 

86). What will be has already been, there is no need to struggle against fate.

Another important theme of this novel is the horror of war. This theme is evinced by

the devastation caused by the bombing of Dresden .”It must have been hell on the 

ground”(P.198). The needless deaths of soldiers like Edgar Derby, young children

and old men serving as soldiers and the devastation of the landscape which ends up

resembling the surface of the moon covering “corpse mines”(P. 214) all tell of the 

senseless horror that is war.