Fate In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

The first way Kurt Vonnegut’s manipulation of time contributes to the effectiveness of Slaughterhouse-Five as a whole is that it allows an easy transition between life and death. Vonnegut repeatedly uses the phrase “So it goes.” throughout his novel. Every time death occurs in the novel, the phrase is used, which then leads to a transition to life. For example, when Billy is in Dresden he recounts a time where he saw a Pole hanged for having sexual intercourse with a German woman. This results in Vonnegut ending the

Billy Pilgrim is the person that the book is written around. We follow him, perhaps not in a straight order, from his youth joining the military to his abduction on the alien planet of Tralmalfadore, to his older age at his 1960s home in Illum. It is his experiences and journeys that we follow, and his actions we read about. However, Billy had a specific lack of character for a main one. He is not heroic, he has very little personality traits, let alone an immersive and complex character. Most of the story is written around his experiences that seem more like symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his World War Two days, combined with hallucinations after a brain injury in a near-fatal plane

Moments in Billy's life change instantaneously, not giving Billy a clue to where he will end up next. In one moment, he is sitting in his home typing a letter to the local newspaper about his experience with the Tralfamadorians, and in the next he is a lost soldier of World War II running around behind German lines aimlessly without a coat or proper shoes. He then became a child being thrown into a pool by his father and afterwards a forty-one year old man visiting his mother in an old people's home. In the novel, changes in time are made through transitional statements such as, "Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a jade green mechanical owl." p.56 In the movie there is no such thing and different moments in Billy's life happen instantaneously. Because scenes are continuous as times change, the movie better displays the author's attempt to capture in the notion of being "unstuck in time." On the other hand, the novel does help the audience follow these time changes better by setting it up for the next scene, offering a background of Billy's experiences before they begin through these transitional statements.

Billy Pilgrim's life is far from normal. Throughout most of his adult life he has been moving backwards and forwards through time, from one event to another, in a non-sequential order. At least, this schizophrenic life is hard to understand. Because Vonnegut wants the reader to relate to Billy

For instance, in the plane crash just mentioned. Billy experienced an occasion that would damage most men. Ordinarily, when a man has seen a shocking event, and sees all his dear colleagues die, he would be forever different. Billy, however, has knowledgeable from the Tralfamadorians that all the events just happening, and nor he and neither anyone can do stop them. The Tralfamadorians says that you should concentrate on the great recollections in life, and not on the terrible times. Another case of Billy encountering an unfathomable occasion command while Billy is in the hospital. His wife carelessly drives to the hospital to see him, just to get into a problem alone the way. She was so stressed over Billy that she overlooked her problem. Veronica continued going towards the hospital in any case. At the point when Barbara, Billy daughter, reached at the hospital, the mother checks out from the exhaust. At that time the, “[Billy] daughter Barbara, just twenty-one years old, suddenly motherless and with a father who appears to be mentally unbalanced, takes care of Billy but feels a great deal of resentment and frustration” (Borey 1). She is the only person to take care of her father in family. Billy practically disregards this shocking news. He just goes ahead with his life. This does not make him crazy, he just trusts life and complies with

All through Billy’s life he ran into obstacles that obstructed his free will. As a child Billy’s father lets Billy sink in the deep end of a pool so he could learn how to swim “because his

     Billy Pilgrim has been through many cruelties in his life. As a child his own father was cruel to him. They had gone to the Y.M.C.A. to teach Billy how to swim. A horrible, traumatic, event that would stay with Billy for the rest of his life. “Little Billy was terrified, because his father had said Billy was going to learn to swim by the method of sink-or –swim. His father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim”(43). Roland Wear was a very cruel man as well. He even to it as far as to try and kill Billy by kicking

They could always visit him or her with the use of time travel when he or she was alive. Because the phrase was very often repeated, it somewhat served as a tally to show how frequently death occurs and just how inevitable it is. Billy knew the exact date of his death and how it would happen, but he could not alter it and was no longer afraid of dying, so it had no effect on him because “there is no why[,]” it just “simply is” (77; ch4). He learned this from the Tralfamadorians.

Regardless of the angle in which Slaughterhouse-Five is approached, there is no escaping the destructive properties of warfare the book entails. The novel chronicles Billy Pilgrim, a New York man who has become “unstuck in time.” As a result, the narrative is structured in sections, jumping back and forth through time and space. Billy begins the novel a boy, already dealing with the perils of life from the bottom of a swimming pool. He grows to become a rather awkward and unattractive adolescent who enrolls in an Optometry school only to be drafted into the army during World War II. A weak youth, his battle skills land him a prisoner of war behind German lines. Throw in a nervous breakdown, morphine, brutal living conditions, and the

But ignoring death and its suffering is exactly what Billy should not be doing, Vonnegut suggests. To do so makes him, like the Tralfamadorians, alien and inhuman. He has no sense of his own mortality, an awareness he needs in order to understand that, as Stephen Marten has observed, "life is valuable not because it is infinite but because it is so scarce" (11).

Billy’s travels with the aliens come randomly during his time-traveling spells bring about different insights and lessons that readers can get and put into their everyday lives. For example, on the night Billy is kidnapped by the Tramalfadorians, he asks a simple question that anyone in his position would ask: “Why me?” The Tramalfadorians respond to him in a way that seems bizarre for humans to think about, saying that there is no why and that the moment just is and that all of them are trapped in that moment. The aliens basically tell Billy and the readers that time does not matter in life, and that the most important thing to worry about when dealing with time is the moment that is happening right now, not the past or the future.

An old Greek man named Democritus sits down on a moist log in the year 400 BC to think about his actions: not just his actions, but the actions of everyone around him. It has been troubling him for a while: why does he do them? Does he have free will? Little did he know that philosophers from all over the world and all different time periods would be wondering the same question as him: are our actions a choice, or are they written in stone? Billy Pilgrim, the subject of the book Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, claims that he believes that free will does not exist and repeats the words "so it goes" whenever someone dies, but he may actually believe that free will exists because he cries when he sees horses that are in pain, and he fails to explain what exactly chooses when he jumps in time.

“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations,” (85) And Vonnegut even test this by giving Billy the ability time traveling. Although Billy travel in time, he cannot change what happened in the past. In fact he sees his death, but can’t do anything to change it. “I, Billy Pilgrim will die, have died and always die on February thirteenth, 1976” (140) This unchangeable of time shows that proceed from past to future and nothing can change the sequence of this progression. This is like the domino’s movement its movement determined by the laws of physics everything is bounded in each other if you take one domino out than the movement will stop in this case if we change the past there will be no future. Ironically even Tralfamadorians do live in time, they still struggle against constraints on their free-will and this is almost hilarious for us humans who believe that we actually have free-will and can change our future. As a conclusion Kurt Vonnegut planned to juxtapose the free-will and the Tralfamadorian belief determinism by using symbolism.

Billy’s manifestation about Tralfamadore leads one to question his sanity. Tralfamadore is something that he solely imagines. He begins reading Kilgore Trout’s science fiction at a stage in which he is losing the grip he has on reality. He is already unable to live fully in the present and cannot control his movements forward and backward through time. Science fiction helps his attempt to “reinvent himself and reinvent his universe.” Billy cannot change the fact that living life normally after the war is no longer a possibility. He recovers his sanity by creating a new comprehension of the progression of time. The Tralfamadorians, who strongly resemble some of Trout’s creations, explain how the entirety of the world works and they serve as

The anti-war story of Slaughterhouse-Five centers on an awkward Billy Pilgrim, a man who travels through time and has had extraordinary experiences on the planet Tralfamadore with its inhabitants, the Tralfamadorians. Pilgrim, like Vonnegut, fought in World War II and was still relatively new to the war when he was taken as prisoner by German soldiers. He too was held in a slaughterhouse underground, which led to his survival of the 1945 Dresden Firebombing, and was also held behind to gather and burn the remains of the dead. Pilgrim claims that on his daughter’s wedding night, he was first abducted by the Tralfamadorians, the aliens that inhabited the planet Tralfamadore. These aliens have a fourth dimension; time. The Tralfamadorians view time as a literal timeline; everything is predetermined, and they can access any point of time at their will. Pilgrim returns to earth and believes that it is his duty to make humans aware of this philosophy, and to spread the Tralfamadorians’ message. By the end of the book, the reader comes to find that the time shifting and extraterrestrial experiences