Tralfamadorians In Slaughterhouse Five

Their wills, which are believed to be freely gained, are actually the result of a causal chain originating from birth. The fact that humans are governed by their genes and environment means that the ability to make moral decisions as free agents is illusory. For these reasons, the hard determinist position, which is a sound, science-based theory, seems to be incompatible with the concept of free will.

There are those who think that our behavior is a result of free choice, but there are also others who believe we are servants of cosmic destiny, and that behavior is nothing but a reflex of heredity and environment. The position of determinism is that every event is the necessary outcome of a cause or set of causes, and everything is a consequence of external forces, and such forces produce all that happens. Therefore, according to this statement, man is not free.

This quote supports that claim, and this quote also shows us determinism. Determinism is a idea that we don’t control our lives, and that everything is decided for us when we

Your geography and you beliefs determined greatly who you are as a person but no one had a choice on that during their formative years. So there are so many factors and causes that affect freewill that’s not under the individual’s control. Let’s acknowledge that. In the context of life being a canvas you can visualize your life as a specific and unique individual pathway on the canvas of life with with different choices(options) available as one moves through time. At each moment in time, different choices are available to you within said predetermined path. The pathway is already predetermined because all time exist at all time all the time, but within each moment you’re are presented with certain set of choices (different set of choices are available at different point in time). These choices range from good to evil as far as their impacts are concerned. So this is why it makes sense to say true freewill doesn’t exist but we can make choices within the predetermined path we find ourselves in. If you think about it from a believer point of view, it’s basically God created everyone differently (predetermined path), with different gifts (drives) manifested through choices available to us at each moment in time. Evil and good are natural forces in this world which

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,

The Tralfamadorians teach Pilgrim that time is not linear like we think it is and that all form of time simultaneously coexists. Moreover, the time continuum introduces the notion that there is no “free will” because no matter what one attempts to change an event, it will occur.

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.

One of the first examples in the book is when the Tralfamadorians say on page 77 “That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?......Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” This quote from the book shows that the Tralfamadorians do not believe in free will. Just like the bugs they are stuck in the moment they are in. They are trapped and they can't change that.

It also depends on how we explain free will; free will in this case is how one acts out on their own will. Our genetics can determine how we can act. When our

The second theme displayed in this book is the illusion of free will. The Tralfamadorians have the knowledge of the fourth dimension which shows them their whole life played out for them and all parts of it happening simultaneously

One of the parallels between his time in the Tramafladorian Zoo and his time as a prisoner are the conversations that Billy Pilgrim observed with the Tramafladorians and the Germans about free will. He time travels back to his first encounter with the Tramafladorians while he is being transported by the Germans on a train car with various others prisoners of war. When they asked him if he had any questions he asks, “Why me?” and their response is, “That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is…There is no why” (97). For the aliens of Tramafladore the occurrences of time should not be questioned and they also do not question what their actions may affect. They establish that it makes sense an earthling would ask “Why?” and they do not attempt to appear as all knowing beings to Billy when

The first matter to be noted is that this view is in no way in contradiction to science. Free will is a natural phenomenon, something that emerged in nature with the emergence of human beings, with their

However, Vonnegut asserts that although God may not exist, free will may not exist either. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he summarizes his opinions with the comment; "among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future (SF 60)." According to the Tralfamadorians, time is constant, and not dynamic. To them, "all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist„.they can see how permanent all the moments are (SF 27)." Because of this, the decisions we make are not due to free will; instead, they occur because "everybody has to do exactly what he does (SF 198)." In Cat’s Cradle, Jonah, the main character, does not travel through time as Billy Pilgrim does, yet he is able to come to the same realization that time is more like a static stretch of mountains than a flowing river. However, unlike Billy, Jonah must discover this without the help of the Tralfamadorians. When Jonah experiences "a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind (CC 67)," he is finally able to understand how all of time is connected.

“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.

My second notion of free will requires that an actor is able to decide between different possibilities of actions that lead towards different futures. Robert Kane calls this concept ‘a garden of forking paths’; every action leads to other actions that again allow for alternatives of action (Kane, 2005: 7). If an actor could not have done otherwise, he would not have had free choice. Even if he did not choose to do otherwise, he could not have done so. Free will seems to require the power to do otherwise, or our actions would