" You guys
have a lot of potential, but there are no guarantees of success. This season is
like an open book, and you guys must write the pages," said our soccer
coach ,Mr. Ziminski, during pre-season. These few words inspired my fellow
teammates and I to work at new and even higher level to achieve our goal of a
successful season. We believed in our coach's words, we controlled our own
destiny; the only way we can achieve our goal of a successful season would be
to work extremely hard before the actual season starts.
In contradictory to the beliefs of my teammates
and I, in the novel Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim, the main
character in the novel, is lead to believe that there is no "open
book"; an individual's destiny remains predetermined and unchangeable.
Upon speaking to the Tralfamadorians, aliens
from another planet, they explain to Billy that his constant "time
tripping",moving back and forth throughout time instantaneously, should
not matter to him since his life is already predetermined. Why does it matter
that you live your life in chronological order? According to the view point of
the Tralfmadorians, the same exact things are going to happen, an idea that is
indeed biased. Based on the fact that Tralfamadorians cannot understand the
human concept of time, they have the ability to pick and choose when they want
to live each moment of their lives
,unlike humans, especially Billy Pilgrim who has no control of his
unpredictable "time tripping[s]."
Furthermore, the Tralfamadorian's belief that
life is predetermined has caused them to concentrate on the good things in life
and forget about the bad, which has lead them to become very un-sentimental
life forms. They constantly use the phrase "so it goes" for everything
that goes wrong, including such emotion evoking things like deaths. They show
no remorse or sorrow because of the fact that they can just jump to a happier
point in their lives when ever the want to. Thus causing the happier points in
life to eventually loose their sparkle because of the fact that if everything
in one's life is happy, then one begins to take it for granted and it looses
it's appeal. Therefore, one needs bad days in one's life in order to truly
enjoy the good ones.
For the most part, the majority of the people
on my soccer team believe that our lives are not predetermined and that they
are dictated by our own actions. Consequently, we worked extremely hard in the
off season to be able to achieve our goal of having a successful season. As for
Billy Pilgrim, his "time tripping" made it impossible for him to get
a chance to control his own destiny, and therefore his life was just dictated
to him. Therefore, the Tralfamadorian's view of life being predetermined might
be true on their planet, but as for on Earth, since our lives are lived in a
chronological order with no way to skip over the bad, one must work as hard as
they can to achieve their goals before that "open book" of life slams
shut at one's demise.
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