Thus spoke Billy Pilgrim Kurt Vonnegut's Nietzschean thought

Abstract

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is often regarded as quietist in its supposed acceptance of the horrors of war and the futility of human action. But in reading this novel from a Nietzschean perspective informed by The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, what is initially seen as fatalism is a recognition of the tragic nature of reality, reflecting the Silenian notion that if one must be born, it is best to die soon. In the recognition of this tragic worldview, Vonnegut's novel can be read as the sort of New Attic Tragedy that Nietzsche so values, with the narrator's acknowledgement of the artifice of the text a reproduction of the Dionysian chorus, which, in an absurd universe, provides metaphysical comfort to the audience. Furthermore, the similarities between the non-linear Tralfamadorian conception of time echoes Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, which both reinforces the tragic worldview and reconciles the narrator's trauma with Silenian reality through the redemptive creation of an eternally recurring art that evidences amor fati.