The Meaning of Life in "Slaughtermatic" by Steve A
The Meaning of Life in "Slaughtermatic" by Steve Aylett
"You think that you’ve got forever to someday make your life mean something, but you don’t…This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time…it’s only after we’ve lost everything that we are free to do anything." (Palahniuk, 76)
The meaning of life, a question that has plagued human’s since the beginning of time, no one really knows what the true answer is, however, people try to live their lives to find this "meaning," to live their lives with no regrets. Throughout a person’s quest to self discovery, there are many obstacles and paths that one encounters, and depending on which direction one decides to take, can change one’s life forever. People live their lives trying to find answers, trying to grasp ideas about themselves. Sometimes these questions yield answers, other times, however, the more one learns, the less one seem to know. In Steve Aylett’s novel, Slaughtermatic, the main character, Dante Cubrit, living in a dystopian world, like many, is trying to find his own answers. His battle, however, is not with those around him, it is the battle within himself and like the novel, is represented in three stages. "The Heist," which represents his search for answers, "The Loose End," which is the sorting of these answers, and "The Inferno," which gives him the answers that he was searching for. In a time where all forms of literature have been destroyed, Dante Cubrit, decides to rob the First National Bank, not for money, but in order to retrieve a book, locked away from society, to find answers about himself, and where his present-day humanity went wrong.
Dante Cubrit lives in a dismal, bleak, futuristic city called Beerlight, " where to ill a man was less a murder than a mannerism and crime the new and only art form" (Aylett, ix). Dante, along with his sidekick, the Entropy Kid, decide to rob the First National Bank, for a book that will prove to be Dante’s "Bible." Dante lives in a world where all forms of literature have been outlawed and everyone around him are "controlled robots," without freedom of thought, speech and consciousness. Dante knows this, he also knows that this book, written by Eddie Gamete and entitled The Impossible Plot Of Biff Barbanel, would hold some answers.
"Under the gloss of violence he had a phobia...