2BR02B

As is often the case in Vonnegut's stories, government control is presented as antagonist to individuality. It is the government which runs the Federal Bureau of Termination gas chambers where the suicides take place. In requiring that each new life come at the cost of any other one, the government assumes that lives are interchangeable. It does not matter which person volunteers to die, as long as there is a volunteer for each birth. Wehling is expected to choose which of his triplets will live, as if each of their lives is exactly the same as the others. Dr. Hitz's reprimand suggests a detached, almost bureaucratic understanding of life. He seems entirely unable to understand the impossible choice that Wehling faces, because he sees no individuality, only numbers.

Sadly, death - especially initiated outside the government controls - remains the only means of self-expression left in the world. Thus, Wehling's suicide is a final expression of his right to control his own fate. By refusing to let his grandfather die, he is implicitly refusing to take part in his society's demands. And yet he plays the world's game at the same time that he negates it, by killing Dr. Hitz and Leora. The murder is both practical, in that it makes room on the planet for two of his triplets, and subversive, in that it forces them to partake in the population control they have been implementing at such an extreme cost to other people. Clearly, they have valued their own lives above those of the newborn Wehlings, or they would volunteer to die in the children's places. In murdering them, Edward K. Wehling, Jr. forces them to buy into their own bogus logic that each life is interchangeable with any other.

One expression of individuality that has been suppressed and controlled in "2BR02B" is art. The painter is unhappy because he is forced to paint a mural that does not represent life as he understands it. The Happy Garden of Life depicts an impossibly formal, well-tended garden that is a metaphor for the world. Every body is interchangeable in the painting; in fact, they have already been painted. He merely fills in the blank circles above them with faces, which again evokes the theme of a lack of individuality. Through population control, people's lives are pruned like branches by gas chamber hostesses like Leora Duncan. But the order comes at the cost of individuality. As the painter tells the hospital orderly, "The world could do with a good deal more mess, if you ask me" (316). The other form of art represented here is the song the hospital orderly sings as he enters. It is an ode to the gas chambers and population control disguised as a love song, declaring that if the object of the singer's affection does not return his love, he will "get off this old planet, let some sweet baby have my place" (315). Even popular songs are controlled to send the government's message.