Billy Pilgrim and the View of Time in "Slaughter House Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

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.

In order to illustrate the devastating affects of war, Kurt Vonnegut afflicted Billy Pilgrim with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which caused him to become “unstuck in time” in the novel. Billy Pilgrim illustrates many symptoms of PTSD throughout the story. Vonnegut uses these Slaughterhouse Five negative examples to illustrate the horrible and devastating examples of war. The examples from the book are parallel to real life experiences of war veterans, including Vonnegut’s, and culminate in a very effective anti-war novel.

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

“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.

This is the Tralfamadorian faith to the point where the is no reason of trying to change anything makes Billy feel like everything he has gone through, no matter how awful, could not have gone any other way. "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. It was like an execution. . . . [Billy] dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that."

The point of view that Slaughterhouse-Five is written from also affects the way the reader fells about time after reading the novel. Since the story is narrated by a omniscient being that is everywhere with Billy Pilgrim, the reader gets a first hand account of every event in his life. Also Billy is very relaxed and accepting all things around him. A good example of this is Billy's habit of following every death with "so it goes". (Vonnegut 69) The repetition of this phrase not only de-emphasizes death, but also helps Vonnegut assert control over the readers response after a death. (Dawley 2) The way Billy

The central conflict of this book is Billy coming to terms with the unfortunate events happening around him, and facing this character versus world scenario of everything and everyone always being against him in some way or another. Billy sees so much suffering and so much death. He is blamed for the death of Ronald Weary, which is not his fault. He witnesses the Dresden Firebombing, and has an overall uneventful blain life to begin with. Billy needs to find a way to cope with this unbearable pressure, and whether or not the Tralmalfadorians are real, their message is real to Billy. The philosophy they present is the excuse Billy needs to justify all the wrong he sees around him. The Tralmalfadorian belief being that there is no free will, and that you timeline is fact, and that you simply experience death, but continue “existing” afterwards. Essentially, you always exist and what happens to you is predetermined fate. This allows Billy to pass on all of the death and misery around him as meant to be. He can rest assured knowing that there is nothing he could about anything in the past, present, or future. There was nothing he could have done or can do to stop the death and torture, weather it is the death of his wife, the firebombing in Dresden, or even his own death. This motivation-less philosophy is his resolution to his devastating conflict, and is directly responsible for his lack of action throughout the 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.

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

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.

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

War is the third topic that is heavily satirized in Slaughterhouse Five. First, Billy almost gets killed because he is time-traveling. Second of all, Vonnegut always says “so it goes” (12) whenever someone dies, so it sort of mocks death. Also, he is given a woman’s jacket when he becomes a POW and it mocks his position in the war also. On the nights of February 13-14 in 1944 the city of Dresden, Germany was subjected to one of the worst air attacks in the history of man. By the end of the bombing 135,000 to 250,000 people had been killed by the combined forces of the United States and the United Kingdom. Dresden was different then Berlin or many of the other military targets which were attacked during World War II because it was never fortified or used for strategic purposes and, therefore, was not considered a military target. At one point, Billy watches a war movie about WWII. He watches it regularly, showing how reality is.

In the book Slaughterhouse-Five the character Billy Pilgrim is a reflection of the author Kurt Vonnegut. He is said to become unstuck in time. But what does the author really mean by “unstuck in time?” The story begins after the bombing of Dresden, which caused PTSD that is very common in many people after being at war.

We all wish we could travel through time, going back to correct our stupid mistakes or zooming ahead to see the future. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, however, time travel does not seem so helpful. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's main character, has come unstuck in time. He bounces back and forth between his past, present, and future lives in a roller coaster time trip that proves both senseless and numbing. Examining Billy's time traveling, his life on Tralfamadore, and the novel's schizophrenic structure shows that time travel is actually a metaphor for our human tendency to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of death.