Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions Essay

Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five and breakfast of ChampionsWho would fix ever thought the centering a radioactive particle decays would relate to whether or not we have bad attitudes towarfareds life? Who would have ever suspected that the structure of space-time continuum would be so closely linked to whether or not we would draw rich wives? And who indeed would have ever expected that the properties of light dexterity affect whether or not we go on homicidal rampages? possibly Kurt Vonnegut did. Could it be possible that a writer known more for his pictures of assholes than his noesis of advanced physical science actually centered some of the deepest concepts in his flora on the philosophical implications of general relativity and quantum mechanics? Two of his superior novels, Slaughterhouse-Five and eat of Champions, both seem to hint at the relationship betwixt modern physics and an idea philosophers call determinism. Vonnegut readers might well cicatrice thei r heads and flip through their copies of these books, searching the stories of the fragmented life of a war veteran and the deranged antics of a mad car salesman for a chapter on the Schrdinger wave equation they may have skipped. I freely leave that their search will be in vain, and that no truly concrete proof exists that Vonnegut based the ideas in these books on the latest discoveries of science. But I also contend that the parallels between Vonneguts work and advanced physics are a little too perfect to be a series of very lucky accidents. From this perspective, it seems likely that Vonnegut used ideas based on physics to support the idea of determinism in Slaughterhouse-Five and destroy it in eat of Champions. But perhaps before arguing about the ways Von... ...e and what he saw made him more optimistic. Or maybe it was all cod to copious consumption of the little pills he takes to cheer up (Vonnegut, Breakfast of 4). Even Vonnegut might not know for certain. All that can be said with confidence is that Vonneguts idea of truth evolved between Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, just like the theories and concepts of physics do even now. In the end, so too must all human knowledge die and be reborn. As Vonnegut might say (Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 34), So it goes.Works CitedRachels, James. Problems from Philosophy. capital of Massachusetts McGraw Hill, 2005.Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. raw York Dell Publishing, 1973.Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York Dell Publishing, 1969.Zukav, Gary. Dancing Wu-Li Masters. New York William Morrow and Company, inc., 1979.