Slaughterhouse-Five

The Tralfamadorians see all of time simultaneously. They know what has happened and what will happen and are able to focus on the nice moments. Things always happen the way they do because of how moments are structured, and no one can do anything to change the future. In fact, the concept of change is difficult for a Tralfamadorian to grasp. To them, free will is just a bizarre fiction discussed on Earth, where people cannot see in four dimensions. All time is fixed, but each moment is always accessible to Tralfamadorians, so they can pick and choose what they want to experience. Each moment essentially exists forever.

Without free will, there seems to be no accountability. There is also no time wasted in blame and punishment. Billy does not blame anyone for what he sees in Dresden, for what he experiences in the war, or for the death of his wife. He simply accepts that things happen as they happen.

There also seems to be no incentive to live one’s life well (according to whatever definition one might have of living well). As long as every life has a few good moments, the time traveler can eternally visit those and be eternally content. However, judging from Billy’s experiences, humans do not seem as able to control time travel or remember with the same selectivity as Tralfamadorians. Billy has no say in his comings and goings through time. Thus, he relives atrocity and horror as much as he relives moments of happiness. If atrocities also last forever to be eternally relived, perhaps there is incentive not to act atrociously after all.

A linear story does emerge out of the jumble of time-shifted details in the novel: the story of Billy Pilgrim, POW, making his way through time and across the European theater of World War II toward Dresden, the scene of ultimate destruction. Every time we return to this thread of the narrative, it unfolds in chronological order. Interspersed in this order are wild zigzags forward and backward through Billy’s life. These time jumps might be confusing, but they give force to the horror we encounter along the way. Vonnegut feeds the novel’s emotional momentum with the transitions between time jumps. For example, in Chapter 3 Billy is transported from his bed in Ilium, where he weeps after seeing cripples in the street, to the POW march in Luxembourg, where he weeps because of the wind in his eyes. Such transitions take the place of traditional narrative devices such as foreshadowing. Vonnegut gives away the climax he had been considering for his grand narrative (Edgar Derby’s execution) in Chapter 1; when we finally get to the telling of it, at the end of Chapter 10, it comes as an afterthought.

In addition, the novel might be schizophrenic, but it is not random. On the one hand, death strikes indiscriminately, and we never know who the next victim will be. But, on the other hand, the sheer volume of seemingly random deaths adds up to an emotional weight like that of the Tralfamadorian novel described in Chapter 5.