Free Will In The Tralfamadorian

Billy is human, and he believes what the Tralfamadorians teach. Some may argue that a human, receiving information from super intelligent aliens, may cause insanity, and that no human is meant to live in four dimensions. Billy Pilgrim handles this

The Tralfamadorians, who explain this nature of time and existence to Billy, are shown as enlightened creatures while the humans back on earth are seen as backwards -- to such an extent that they believe in free will. Billy towards the end of his life becomes a preacher of these virtues of existence taught to him by his zookeepers on Tralfamadore, going around and speaking about his experiences and his acquired knowledge. This is ironic, because he is attempting to reverse the steady path of life, even time itself.

A reason for Billy being so unattached would be PTSD. PTSD leaves people feeling alone and depressed. He is having flashbacks of parts of his life and at the end of the book he is reliving his moments during the war.

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.

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

Since the first time Billy claimed to have come unstuck in time while in the forest leaning against a tree, he has depended on an alternate reality in which he has created a new life for himself to avoid thoughts of the horrific events he witnessed while in Dresden. Although Billy claims that he was abducted by the Tralfamadorians, in reality, he was captured by the Germans. The reason that the Tralfamadorians exist is so that Billy can escape from the harsh reality of being a prisoner of war. Although separate in Billy’s conscience, the Nazis and the Tralfamadorians are interchangeable. Billy’s adventures on Tralfamadore all have significant and undeniable connections to his life:

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.

Billy has lost a sense of love as death has faced him in the eyes once too many. Billy deals with his pain by turning to alcohol abuse, he cannot deal with his mourning, "Sometimes it's not as if they have died so much as that I myself have died and become a ghost." (43). From Dolores and Billy, the central theme is slowly revealed.

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 and Jonah both have unique insights into the nature of time, consequently, they have resigned themselves to fate; neither of them cares about death or life because they know that they are helpless to change the future. Whenever Jonah recounts a story,

“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.

At the end of the story we see the main theme; nature is extremely powerful is indifferent to man's feelings, it doesn't care if man lives or dies but fate is man's worst enemy. Sadly, there is proof of this when we see Billy’s dead body washed up on the beach. The man that did everything in his power to survive died, this shows that a man's destiny depends on his fate.

“’Free Will’ is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.” In simple terms free will is what makes us able to make a decision, to choose something over something else. Since the Tralfamadorians are aliens and have the ability to see the fourth dimension they can see things humans cannot see and have a different understanding of the world, the universe and how everything in life works.

“’Free Will’ is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.” In simple terms free will is what makes us able to make a decision, to choose something you want over something you do not want. Since the Tralfamadorians are aliens and have the ability to see the fourth dimension they can see things humans cannot see and have a different understanding of the world, the universe and how everything in life works.

From then on, he insists that aliens abducted him, and one of the main ideas that they convey to him is fate. Tralfamadorians believe that free will is only a fruit of the human mind, and that every moment is already predestined. Billy becomes strongly convinced of this idea, and later on, as he flutters through his life, this belief that he possesses no power to change the course of events lifts a huge burden of suffering off his shoulders. This relief is conveyed (when he doesn’t save people from plane crash).The reader also notices this unbelievable ease at the end of the book because Billy (…………). Compared to the situation, Billy reacts very composedly, and he shows this through the way he (…….) instead of radiating pain and sorrow to people around him and himself. Along with Billy Pilgrim, Tralfamadorians also demonstrate the ease they have because they know that they have no might to alter the future. The reader realizes this especially when these aliens admit very casually that (……..). This acceptance of powerlessness that both Billy and Tralfamadorians have allows them to lead a more carefree present life without worrying about the future they cannot change. As a result, Billy Pilgrim is able to stay perfectly serene through tough moments, including his death, and Tralfamadorians are capable of