Catherine Dwyer John Capute War & Peace 11 April 2024 Evil in Complicity Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five presents us with characters from aliens on Tralfamadore to soldiers like Billy Pilgrim; however, throughout the cast of characters we meet, Vonnegut does not create a traditional villain. Vonnegut recounts, “Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know—you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’ I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war” (10). With no intention of including a villain in his story, we have no one to offload our blame onto or provide a simple justification for the atrocities of Dresden or any other war event that led to suffering. Vonnegut understands that creating an antagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five cannot prevent or remedy the atrocities that have…show more content… Our passive attitude towards war is presented through the Tralmadorian perspective and morphed into the antagonist in Vonnegut’s novel as we fall into justifications that minimize the atrocities of war. The Tralmadorian beliefs Vonnegut creates encourages passivity and develops into an antagonistic force that breeds attitudes complicit in violence and atrocity. An idea a Tralmadorian emphasizes to Billy Pilgrim says, “‘That’s one thing earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones’” (150). By taking on this perspective, Billy recoils from life, resorting to “Magic Fingers” and “Taste-Freeze” frozen custard to distract from the unpleasant emotions and trauma arising from his time as a soldier (78, 79). The pessimistic, Tralmadorian attitude extends to how Billy approaches life because “Among the things, Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future” (77). Billy’s perception of life robs him of free will because he actively refrains from
