Utkarsha Srivastava

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS ABSTRACT The present study aims to analyse Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) from an existential and absurd perspective in order to show the impact of Absurdity as talked about in the Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus(1969) on literature. This study is based on the analysis of the major themes of the novel, the absurd, death and time. In order to analyse the corpus under the study we have adopted the philosophy of Albert Camus to analyse the theme of the absurd. KEYWORDS – Sisyphus, Absurdity, Meaninglessness, Existentialism INTRODUCTION Here you are, somehow either through the combination of tragic events in which you felt the harsh stabbing of the truth of life bleed you out into a melancholy or the sudden realization of the meaninglessness of the world in the indifference that the universe reflects upon humanity, you’ve decided to willingly climb the structure of a building and let the entirety of your existence smack into a sidewalk. You know all the clichés – “ We care about you, We love you”, “ Well there must be honesty behind this statement but why has this been brought to my attention now and not the moments preceding when I was about to leave your life?” The world makes no sense. We are brought under the assumption that the bad will get what they truly deserve and the good will be rewarded for their deeds. Then why do horrible things happen? While you are thinking this, the face of a man with a warm smile and the stench of 1940s French cigarettes, is the first thing that will greet your perception of Albert Camus, one of the famous novelists of the twentieth century. Camus loved life and he loved art and he may be the best person to agree with our perceived utter meaninglessness of the world. Camus even has a name for it, not necessarily the meaningless of the world but what people perceive of it – Absurdity. Albert Camus believes that we live in an absurd world because of our tendency to search for a reason, truth or some kind of meaning . We set systems to discover this truth – religion and philosophy, but they never seem to completely work out simply because how the world works, how reality functions , is not under these truths. Camus states that nothing becomes a tragedy until the hero is conscious of their circumstances He uses the Greek myth of Sisyphus to make his point. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is the crafty king who managed to chain Death himself, ushering in a brief age of immortality for humankind. As punishment, Zeus forced Sisyphus to free Death and cursed him with a different kind of immortality: An eternity spent rolling a boulder up a steep hill, only to see it roll back down — forcing him to start the process anew — without ever reaching the top. Sisyphus is performing a task of absolute futility , meaninglessness but he knows that his actions are meaningless, futile and he’s stuck there but he doesn’t hope that one day things will get better. He doesn’t jump off from the top of the mountain in order to end his suffering and kill himself. Rather Sisyphus enjoys it and he embraces the absurdity of his condition and by enjoying it, he revolts against it. “ Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards a height is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Considering in mind the Myth of Sisyphus (1942), we’ll now proceed to analyse Kurt Vonnegyut’s novel ‘Slaughterhouse Five’(1969). EXISTENTIALISM It is defined by the French philosopher and the writer Jean-Paul Sartre as [..] a doctrine which makes human life possible and, in addition, declares that every truth and every action implies a human subjectivity. (Sartre32) It is also the most controversial philosophy in the twenties century. Existentialism is a philosophy of contemplation in human being; his actions, his feelings and decisions. In other word, it is concerned with human being as a whole. The existentialists dealt with the existence of man in a way no body did before them through a series of themes that highlight different sides of human life. Existentialism is a philosophical approach that rejects the idea that the universe offers any clues about how humanity should live. A simplified understanding of this thought system can be found in Jean-Paul Sartre’s often-repeated dictum ‘‘Existence precedes essence.’’ What this means is that the identity of any one person— their essence—cannot be found by examining what other people are like, but only in what that particular person has done. Because no one can claim that his or her actions are ‘‘caused’’ by anyone else. (Milne222) ABSURDITY It is the act of questioning whether life is worth to be lived and it means that life is meaningless. Death is the main source of the absurd therefore people keep thinking that life is not valuable since it will end with death. This state is related to the modern and postmodern individual, whereby, he was living a confused life full of paradoxes. In addition, the feeling of estrangement and the detachment from life increased in the psychology of this individual which is something lead him to commit suicide according to Camus’s philosophy. Albert Camus said ’’Living naturally is never easy’’ but he suggested that the man should never stop at this stage of life. Again, he spotted the light on the issue of suicide by questioning whether suicide is the best solution for the absurd situations. In his opinion man should resists for his existence in order to make life meaningful. “ You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies you have recognized even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit. The absence of any profound reason of living.” (Camus 5.6) SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi-autobiographic novel which narrates the story of Dresden fire bombing. The story is the personnel experience of the American writer Kurt Vonnegut in the World War II as a soldier and as prisoner of war. In this novel, the writer represents the history of painful events that he witnessed in the past but he mixed it with imagination like the planet Tralfamador and the aliens. Vonnegut stated this in the first page of his novel: “A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod [and smoking too much],who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, 'The Florence of the Elbe,' a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.” (Vonnegut) 29 The plot of the story is totally different from the traditional one because it lacks most of the element of the traditional plot such as the climax, the conflict and rising actions and falling actions. By contrary, the plot is random because the main character Billy is travelling in time and each time tell a story related to the place that goes to it. In addition, the novel is written from third person point of view but the open chapter is written from first person point of view which is something that indicates the presence of the author Kurt Vonnegut. The author raises the matter of homosexuality and pornography and this is obvious in several scenes in the novel. SUMMARY Slaughterhouse-Five is plotless novel; it means that there is no beginning, no middle (or climax), resolution and no end. It is an anti-war novel and the story is about the life of a man named Billy Pilgrim. The turning point in Billy’s life is when he went to war and was kidnapped by the German lines. Billy is entrapped in time and travels back and forth through his life visiting his childhood, his experience in the World War two and his death. Billy Pilgrim, born in 1922 is captured behind German lines and along with the other POWs is sent to Dresden. On one certain night in the February of 1945, Dresden is bombed, many people are killed. Billy at that, with some other POWs was in a meat celler and when he comes out the next day at soon, he’s surprised to find that the landscape looks like the surface of moon with no food or water. In May, Russians took the area and Billy is repatriated and he goes back, finishes his study and becomes rich with the help of his wife, Valencia’s father. They have two children ,a son and a daughter. Unfortunately, Billy along with his wife was on a plane when it crashes and Valencia is killed. On the night of his daughter’s wedding, Billy claims that he was kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore which exists in the fourth dimension. The novel ends when the war ends. MYTH OF SISYPHUS AND BILLY Comparing Billy as a character to Camus’s philosophy towards his absurd hero in his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, we can easily see how Vonnegyut has used Camus as a refrence to build Billy. For him the absurd hero sustains his sufferance and faces the absurd life. “Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” (Camus 77) Further, Billy Pilgrim is unhappy in his life; as many circumstances in the novel make him believe in the meaninglessness of life : “'Saved your life again, you dumb bastard,' Weary said to Billy in the ditch. He had been saving Billy's life for days, cursing him, kicking him, slapping him, making him move. It was 44 absolutely necessary that cruelty be used, because Billy wouldn't do anything to save himself. Billy wanted to quit.” (Vonnegut 19) “She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.” (Vonnegut 48) “Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. (Vonnegut 48) The three excerpts show that Billy believed that life is not worth life and hence he felt alienated but like Sisyphus he revolted and never walked the path of ending his life. Again, this is Camus’s philosophical view about facing the absurd life. He is completely against committing suicide as a solution to end the absurd feeling , the meaninglessness and the alienation, his answer for the question- does the absurd dictates death? Was as the following: The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can then analyse the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself. (Camus 8) According to Camus’s description of the absurd hero and his philosophy of the absurdity and the way that the one should face the absurd life; we can clearly come to the conclusion that Billy Pilgrim is an absurd character and more precisely an absurd hero. Moreover, Billy faced the absurd life as Camus suggested in his essay Absurdity and Suicide. CONCLUSION Billy confronts the absurd as he accepts the inevitability of war and the nonexistence of free will. The Tralfamadorians claim that all men are “trapped in the amber of the moment,” implying that all moments exist separately from man’s chronological construct of time (396). Life becomes endless in these moments that exist eternally. Billy’s recognition of determinism forces him into an absurd state where he fails to perceive meaning in a world in which he has no control. Camus’ definition of the absurd claims that “man feels an alien” in an absurd world, and in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy is disconnected from meaning by a literal alien. Vonnegut saw the absurdity of the “so it goes” notion in person, and in Slaughterhouse-Five, he portrays the inhumanity with the same insensitive manner he witnessed as a prisoner. Vonnegut’s theme of absurdity in Slaughterhouse-Five is unlike his other novels, as Vonnegut offers it to his readers with a peaceful outstretched hand, pleading with them to realize that war invites absurdism to destroy the soul. Vonnegut’s writing encourages a better humanity, one that accepts the existence of the absurd but relies on human decency to find meaning.