I do think that there is freewill. My belief is (and this might sound really cliche) life is what you make it. If you think your “fate” is to be a bum on the street, and you don’t do anything to try and prevent that from happening, than yeah you’re going to be a bum on the street. The same can be said about the opposite. If you shoot for the stars and work hard enough, than you'll be successful. I believe that the smallest thing can influence a person's life, and all of these (small or large) come together to form what is the outcome of somebody's life. This can be related to the "Run Lola Run" movie clip we watched in class. The clip shows a red haired girl running through the streets, and just by her running she is affecting many different people around her. To a normal person her "influence" (bumping into people, making cars stop, etc.) probably wouldn't be classified as "life changing", but in reality they are. An example of this is the lady seen in the clip, where she's pushing a baby stroller. Just because the red haired girl bumped into her shoulder she is seen in the future miserable because she lost her child. Is this an exaggeration? Maybe. But who are we to judge? How do we know that these types of small things don't affect us? I also think that life just comes down to random chance. I could walk outside my house right now, and be struck dead on the head by a falling meteor. Is this likely to happen? No. In fact, the chances of a meteor falling from space, breaking through the atmosphere, touching down onto earth, and then hitting such a small target like me is probably som0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%. Probably even less! But does this completely rule it out? Of course not. It's definitely happened to other people before.So why not me? The truth is, we'll never know. We'll never be able to tell the future. Just like we'll never know our "fate".If we did then everybody would be millionaires.
Reading Slaughterhouse 5, it’s very easy to see that the novel has strong themes of fate. Kurt Vonnegut notifies the audience many times throughout the book about many of the story’s characters’ and events’ endings (ex. Edgar Derby, Billy Pilgrim, THE ENDING OF THE BOOK!). As the reader being given this kind of knowledge, you have this sense of inevitability. Reading the book I kept thinking to myself “Man… it doesn’t matter what these characters do, their end is predetermined and there is nothing to hold it back or change it”.
This book put things into perspective for me, and it really made me think a lot about the idea of fate. I’m not even finished the book yet and already Vonnegut is shaping up to be one of my favourite authors of all time! But, I don’t agree with the views on fate in the book. I really don’t like the thought of having an unchangeable end when it comes to one’s destiny. I find that both depressing and demotivating. I like to believe that we all have freewill, and our “fate” is what we make it to be.
