The Sirens of Titan

The Sirens of Titan explores the illusion of free will. Throughout the novel, humans are forced to reckon with their own lack of control over their destinies. Despite their wealth and privilege, for example, Constant and Beatrice can do nothing to prevent Rumfoord’s predictions from coming true. They do everything in their power to assert their free will, with Constant essentially bankrupting himself and Beatrice trying to avoid Rumfoord’s presence. They fail, nonetheless. Constant’s desire to assert his free will is especially ironic given the way in which his father made his fortune: Noel Constant invested in certain stocks depending on whether their initials correlated with words in the Bible, thereby giving himself up to fate and profiting hugely from doing so. In an attempt to defy this kind of divine fortune and abandonment of free will, Constant achieves the opposite. As such, the opening sections of the novel suggest that the characters who accept that they have no free will are richly rewarded, while those who are desperate to demonstrate their own agency are ruined in the process.

Rumfoord is not especially pleased that he has the power of prophecy. He knows how and when things will occur, though he does not necessarily know why. He discovers that he and the rest of his species are on a fixed track, moving forward toward an inevitable conclusion in which he will play an important role. Rather than reveling in his own importance, Rumfoord is bored. He continues with the plan, moving through a checklist of events which do not particularly thrill him. This plan involves the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to set up a new religion. Without free will, however, Rumfoord feels no guilt. Their deaths were programmed into the universe in the same way that the abuse of his wife is apparently inevitable. By believing that he is destined to become the mastermind of a brutal and violent war which will alter the history of humanity, Rumfoord is able to excuse the moral questions prompted by his actions. He dispels responsibility by accepting his lack of free will.

Although the religion he creates is based on an indifferent god, Rumfoord is nevertheless horrified to discover in the end that his actions—and the actions of all humanity—are actually fairly irrelevant. Humanity’s great works, from Stonehenge to the Great Wall of China, are merely attempts to send benign messages between Tralfamadore and Salo, and humanity has been manipulated by the Tralfamadorians to transport a hunk of metal to Salo on Titan. In this context, humanity has no free will. The species is a tool, designed to help a machine progress on a mission. Rather than a species asserting its own agency and questioning its own place in the galaxy, humanity is a mere footnote in a much larger story. Free will has always been an illusion, a containment mechanism designed to further the goals of a distant alien species.