Free Will In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

… Disorientation and confusion“ ("Trauma/PTSD"). Vonnegut writes, in one of the very first chapters, “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day” (Vonnegut 23). Throughout the book we are taken on a spastic and wild journey from one moment in Pilgrim’s life to another. For instance, Pilgrim is walking through the horribly cold, bleak and depressing German landscape with “The Three Musketeers” and ends up being dragged by Weary most of the way. As soon as the two scouts ditch him and Weary and it seems their ordeal couldn’t get any worse, Pilgrim “time travels” to a moment in which he has just won the Presidency of The Lion’s Club and proceeds to gives an impressive speech. (Vonnegut 48-50). This sort of behavior, completely dissociating oneself from the horrible situation at hand, is typical of PTSD. Pilgrim wanted to escape completely from the cold and depressing “hell” he was in and be back in happiness, where he had just won a successful campaign for the Presidency of his club. This is what happens throughout the book and it is simply another example of Pilgrim’s widespread and horribly debilitating case of PTSD.

Vonnegut calls upon his personal experiences to create his breakthrough work, Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut expresses his own feeling on war, family, and free will through the non-linear narrative of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. His experience as a soldier and death within his family are mirrored into Pilgrim’s character.

The reason, behind the readers of Slaughterhouse-five, believing that Billy had become “unstuck in time” was simply the way he moved back and fourth in time. But as the reader reads on, Billy’s illusions become stranger. For example he believes that he is taken the night of his daughters wedding to a different planet with the Tralfamadorians. It all begins for this part of time travelling when he could not

Many people returned from World War II with disturbing images forever stuck in their heads. Others returned and went crazy due to the many hardships and terrors faced. The protagonist in Slaughter-House Five, Billy Pilgrim, has to deal with some of these things along with many other complications in his life. Slaughter House Five (1968), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is an anti-war novel about a man’s life before, after and during the time he spent fighting in World War II. While Billy is trying to escape from behind enemy lines, he is captured and imprisoned in a German slaughterhouse. The author tells of Billy’s terrible experiences there. After the war, Billy marries and goes to school to

“Fate is a misconception, it's only a cover-up for the fact you don't have control over your own life.” –Anonymous. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-five, an optometrist named Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time uncontrollably and constantly travels between his past, present, and future. Since Pilgrim is unable to control his time warps, he is forced to re-live agonizing moments such as watching his wartime friend Edgar Derby executed for stealing or going through the Dresden bombing repeatedly. However, he is also able to visit pleasant moments like speaking as president in front of the Lions club or his honeymoon with his wife, Valencia. Vonnegut’s use of repetition and vision of war, time and death are crucial to Pilgrim as he

SlaughterHouse-Five is a book about a man named Billy Pilgrim who is stuck in time, and constantly travels throughout different events in his life. Billy accepts different values and sees traumatic and morbid events differently than others. Billy accepts a way of life that is not perceivable to other humans. Many would argue that Billy’s experiences make him insane, but Billy’s experiences with the Tralfamadorians actually allows him to preserve his sanity, and stay a very intelligent man.

More of the time travels Billy has take him to his time on the planet Tralfamadore. Billy says that the aliens abducted him on his daughter's wedding night and returned him a few milliseconds later, but actually spend many months on Tralfamadore because the Tralfamadorians can also see in the fourth dimension, time, which allowed them to keep Billy for what seemed like longer than what he was actually there. While on Tralfamadore, Billy learns to accept his life as it is dealt to him because nothing that happens to you damages you forever. Since time is relative, and your life is like a mountain range, your death ,birth, and all the events in between are nothing more than peaks in a range of mountains, irremovable and able to be visited numerous times.

The concept of being "unstuck in time" refers to a person living from one moment in life to another instead of the day-to-day one we live today. The main character of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim, does just that. He travels through the time line of his life experiencing moments of it in no particular order. In a flash, time travel for Billy happens with no warning to where he will turn up next. On the night of his daughter's wedding, Billy is abducted by extra-terrestrials from the planet Tralfamadore. They enlighten him on the concept of being "unstuck in time." Their belief is that, "When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that

While never a defeatist, Billy merely flows through his disjointed life without much heed to the event at hand. Billy realizes that he holds the power to create his own happiness and satisfaction out of life through appreciation of the present moment rather than contemplate the occurrence of past and future. Vonnegut develops Billy Pilgrim as a unique protagonist as a means of forcing the reader to question the application of free will upon society and gain a new perspective on the beauty of the present.

The book Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, is an anti-war book about Vonnegut’s exposure to the vivid events that unfolded during his time at the slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany and how it affected him. The story is told by Vonnegut through the perspective of the main protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Billy was a survivor from WWII and the Dresden bombing, but after returning he claims to have traveled through time to explicit memories from life and had been abducted by Tralfamadorians (aliens). However, in the film Slaughterhouse-Five, directed by George Roy Hill, viewers see slight changes to the storyline. Viewers notice that in the opening scene that Vonnegut’s friend Bernard O’Hare and his wife, Mary O’Hare, are never

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).

In Slaughterhouse-five Billy Pilgrim begins to learn that we as people have no real power over life and we cannot change our past “So it goes”, therefore in his eyes there is no such thing as free will (Vonnegut, 1999). Billy gets this view of life after he meets the Tralfamdorians, they accept their fate in life and know they are powerless and cannot change it unlike humans, who according to the Tralfamadorians are the only ones who speak of the existence of free will,

It is ironic that Billy Pilgrim tries to promote the idea that fate is predetermined through the use of his own free will. Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut refers to the lack of free will for Billy Pilgrim. “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future” (60). The idea that Billy could not change anything in his world is a recurring theme throughout the book. There is constant talk about how everything in the world is predetermined, and there is nothing that can or should be done in order to try and change what will happen. Again, the idea of predetermination is evident through the Tralfamadorian perspective: "Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply

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.

This book can be quite confusing if not read with utmost care. Because the main character, Billy, becomes “unstuck in time,” (29) the book does not go in chronological order. That is solely because of this fact one must analyse the plot, making sure one does not get confused. To start out in the explanation of the plot in Slaughterhouse Five one must first look at where the action starts to incline, otherwise known as the rising action. Rising action would be best represented as Vonnegut’s character Billy “was taken prisoner by the Germans” (30). It is here where the rising action is because suspense is created, which locks the reader into the book, which makes them want to keep reading. This is where the reader becomes apprehensive about the characters safety. After the rising action comes the climax of the story. The climax is the moment of the most intensity in the story. The climax includes the reason why this book was written; Dresden. The most intense moment in this book is when Billy Pilgrim traveled to the time that “...Dresden was destroyed.” (226). To the reader this gives them information which they have been waiting for since they Vonnegut first mentioned it. Although a reader could infer what happened to Dresden the reader didn’t know what happened to Billy in Dresden, including whether he was hurt or not. In this case Billy was not hurt because he was “down in the meat locker…[which] was a very safe shelter.” (226). Although since the plot is always flashing back and forth between the present and past the reader knew that Billy did not die. Lastly is the part where all the loose ends are tied up. This is also called the falling action. The falling actions in this book occurs when Billy is about to present his insight on his findings of the subject of death, which the Tralfamadorians taught him. Billy was finally able to conclude that “we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may seem to be…” (269).