Essay on Tralfamadore- Truth or Imagination?

Many argue that Billy is completely insane. Their position may include the fact that Billy never mentioned the planet Tralfamadore before he got into the plane crash. This is a great point because an event such a plane crash could very well leave

Yet another incident that points out Pilgrim’s PTSD is one in which he experiences the symptoms described as, “… veterans complained of palpitations, chest pain, headache, dimness of vision and giddiness” (Saperstein). One major example of 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.

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.

The reality in this novel is about how real it is to Billy Pilgrim (Kurt Vonnegut). He is never really time travelling it is just a part of his stage in life that he keeps replaying. Due to the devastation he had to watch it is hard for him to live everyday as a normal person. And again this all relates to PTSD. It is not a given fact that Billy had PTSD, however as you read the novel you understand more about his life and why he is the way he is.

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 first of the two stories I chose to compare and contrast is titled “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and the second story is titled “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence. I will compare each of their themes, characters, and plot developments in which they are both similar and different. One of the strongest comparison would be that both stories deal with the subject of luck in one sense or another. The Lottery being considered a game of chance in which luck plays an important factor in being the chosen winner but Luck in the Lottery has a different twist of fate because the winner of the Lottery is actually the

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

The soldiers didn't even have to have gone home to begin to feel the effects of the war. Rat Kiley, a young medic in Vietnam started to feel the effects right then and there, and it resulted in him shooting himself in order to escape the war. The conditions of the war, the long night time treks, the silence, broken only by the sounds of ghosts, the constant darkness. It could drive anyone crazy. The constant death too, ‘… too many body bags… too much gore…'. Sometimes this paranoia-based insanity would embody itself in the form of something randomly chosen yet relevant, something for the person to obsess about in order to temporarily distance themselves from what was actually occurring around them. At times the obsessing would involve their immediate surrounds, like Rat Kiley who began to those around him as nothing more than bodies, and began to imagine how they would look without an arm, or a leg, or even ‘… what it would feel like to pick up the head and carry it over to a chopper and dump it in…'. It could even take form as self obsession, Rat Kiley began to envision his own death, parts of his own body being removed and eaten by the insects in Vietnam. Kiley's constant visions led to his self-harming in order to be taken away to Japan, some kind of a haven after the

Billy Pilgrim has not come unstuck in time; Billy has become a victim of violent warfare. Common to many soldiers of war, he has witnessed such horrific events during the bombing of Dresden that he has acquired Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In order to avoid the reality of his cruel life and of the war, Billy has become dependant on escapism. Through escapism he has created the planet of Tralfamadore and the Tralfamadorians.

Have you ever felt like you could be in 2 places at once? The Tralfamadorians have the free will to go fourth dimensional view of their daily lives. It comforts Billy to think that time is totally predetermined and unchangeable and there is no free will.

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).

Once Billy becomes capable of time travel and comes into contact with the Tralfamadorians, he simply goes through the motions of life but avoids falling into a defeatist attitude. Under the tutelage of the Tralfamadorians, Billy fashions a brand new perspective towards society and enhances his natural persona, “When Billy accepts the Tralfamadorian philosophy, the passivity that he has displayed his entire life—from wanting to drift quietly at the bottom of the YMCA pool after his father throws him in, to begging Roland Weary to leave him behind—is justified. If the future cannot be changed anyway, why even try?” (Farrell 9). Though the interaction with the Tralfamadorians seems to allow Billy an outlet to construct his own ideals upon the universe, he nonetheless continues along the same path as before. Billy becomes an extremist towards passivity in life rather than utilizing the experience to impart a strong impression

When he tells Billy that he needs to figure it out and snap out of it, Billy says, “ You guys go on without me. I’m all right” (Vonnegut 47). This just displays the hopelessness in Billy’s life. The war has driven him to lose touch with himself and not value his own life. This makes it very easy for a reader to feel empathy for Billy and get an idea of how war can really affect these men. Billy isn’t the only character that Vonnegut uses to depict the terrors of war.

Billy is tired of the trash cans and trash bags of pondiville living in happiness and peace. So he is making a plan to make an intergalactic trip with all of his minions to destroy their planet.