Critiques Against Society

Both Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and Epictetus' Handbook critique society in some way. "Do not be joyful about any superiority that is not your own. If the horse were to say joyfully, 'I am beautiful,' one could put up with it. But certainly you, when you say joyfully, 'I have a beautiful horse,' are joyful about the good of the horse." (Handbook of Epictetus, #6) This is critiquing people's tendency to boast about their possessions. This is similar to Vonnegut's critique of people's dislike of bad breath. He explains this to us through one of Kilgore Trout's novels in which people hate this man for his bad breath but not because of how many people he has killed.
Throughout society people have always created an importance on things that shouldn't really be important. These two writers mock these things and consequently point out how stupid and unimportant they really are.