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The Truth About Free Will

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ENG 503: CLASS PRESENTATION ASSIGNMENT Report

Slaughterhouse Five–Ch. 1-5
For Professor David Copeland
By
Bill Shelson
Alex Tramov
Amani Vandeen-Brown
Duncan Watt

The Truth about Free Will
Throughout the majority of this short novel we are introduced to characters who go through horrific situations that affect them physically and more importantly psychologically. Billy Pilgrim our main character is given the curse of travelling back and forth through time seeing his life events and reliving them as well. He loses control through this ordeal because he has no choice in what moments of his life that he is allowed to go back to. Billy also does not have the physical power to change any events that he is not fond of or prevent any future occurrences that he wishes had not happened. Billy is stripped of his Free Will on many occasions and eventually learns how to cope with it.
The lack of control Billy endures over the experience of his life teaches him to truly appreciate the good moments he’s lived and to accept the inevitability of events. This story is about a man who witnesses and overcomes horrible situations but becomes aware that life will always throw things at you that are not preventable. In the first five chapters of Slaughter House Five our main character Billy finds his situation becoming increasingly dire in the war and beginning to experience his life out of order. "Billy is a spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips are not necessarily fun."(Vonnegut, 23). As a victim and survivor of war Billy develops a kind of inertia to distressing events as a coping mechanism. He becomes not necessarily numb but accepting towards the fact that life goes on with or without you. His saying "So it goes"(Vonnegut) becomes his anchor throughout the whole novel it gets him through some serious times and provides forms of

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