Free Will In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

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:

It makes it difficult to know what time is his “present”. While the narrator wants us to think that Billy is actually time traveling, there is actually evidence that these episode are really PTSD flashbacks. By pretending Billy is time traveling, though, the narrator gives us a first person perspective of how war and PTSD affect people. The episodes are so realistic that Billy believes he is time traveling. Billy’s first episode occurs in the second chapter while he is on the run with Roland Weary and the two scouts, “his attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light” (pg.54). This is a powerful anti-war message because it show the terrible effect of war on an

Billy uses a few ways to cope with his depression, the first being a quote on his wall: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom always to tell the difference” (Vonnegut, 77). Billy clearly states that this is the quote that keeps him going in life; however when reviewing the quote itself it makes me wonder how this is useful to Billy when his mind is a shattered mess with fake time travels and extraterrestrial visits. Another question that arises is why is a religious quote used by Billy? Vonnegut specifically states that he is not religious and nor is Billy, so why use it? It is because Billy only wants to find a way to accept the things he cannot change-the past-and the courage to change the things he can-the future-and the wisdom to tell the difference. The only reason that Billy didn’t go to God is because he views God as pain and death from his interpretation of his mother’s crucifix. The last thing that Billy wanted was more death in his life; therefore, with a mix of his home life and his science fiction novels, he created Tralfamadorians. This quote was used by Billy because he needed an extra push to help himself, resulting in the creation of alien beings. In the end, I still believe that this quote wasn’t quite right for this novel based solely on that he wanted to become more one with

He never intends to for see the future, but he does with his time-tripping. Another apposing factor that occurs is when Billy reveals in a radio talk show that he had been kidnapped by aliens. Society (including his daughter) thought he was mentally ill. His daughter did not know what to do with him. The novel Slaughterhouse Five shows how Billy has been faced with conflict generated by society creating apposing factors.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

All through Billy’s life he ran into obstacles that obstructed his free will. As a child Billy’s father lets Billy sink in the deep end of a pool so he could learn how to swim “because his

     Most of the book is the narrative from Billy Pilgrim a unique character who has the ability to become “unstuck in time”,

“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.

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 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.

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