![]() ![]() Plotlines are based around acting on questions like “What would I have done differently?” and “How do I prevent this from happening?” I’ve sometimes heard questions like “would you kill baby Hitler” thrown around, often jokingly and with little regard for the reality of the space-time continuum. This ties to the common Tralfamadorian saying: “So it goes.” What has happened has happened, and what is going to happen will so it goes.įilms, books and other media dealing with time travel often try to explore the idea of changing the past or the future. According to the Narrator, this means that they view the idea of life and death differently: “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.” This view of time means that one can view their life much more holistically rather than focus on the loss of one moment, the Tralfamadorians find the life in previous moments. Importantly, the Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions rather than the three dimensions of space that humans remain limited to understanding, the Tralfamadorians see our three dimensions plus time. Despite his position in time, Billy also believes that he was abducted by the Tralfamadorians, an alien race that keeps him in a zoo. After the war, Billy is hospitalized for PTSD it’s around this time that he starts becoming unstuck, and the two things are clearly linked.Įven if being unstuck is the product of a psychiatric disorder, it’s still fascinating to consider. This is connected to Billy’s experience as a soldier in Dresden, Germany, where he survives being a prisoner-of-war as well as the destructive firebombing of Dresden in 1945. These jumps tend to be triggered at particularly desperate or traumatic moments and often result in skipping full decades. ![]() Billy’s journey throughout the novel is not linear, but spastic, bouncing between events in his life without rhyme or reason. “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” the narrator tells us at the beginning of the first chapter. But what is most perplexing is the way that “Slaughterhouse-Five” proposes the concept of time, a proposal that forever changed the way I thought about time. ![]() It toes a line between historical fiction and science fiction that few authors have accomplished. It’s a novel impossible to place into a single genre, filled with war and aliens and inherent human grief. In the introduction, the narrator tells you exactly how the book will begin (“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”) and exactly how it will end (“Poo-tee-weet?”). “Slaughterhouse-Five” is partially first-person, narrated by a stand-in for Vonnegut, and partially third-person, with a grand sense of omniscience. Vonnegut’s novel itself is utterly perplexing in many ways. This is the idea of time as a fourth dimension, beyond the three dimensions of space. You can open the book to any page, any time in the story and you will be able to experience that event even if it is done out of order. While we are logically programmed to read the book from start to end, this is not the only way to experience its events. When you hold a book in your hands, you hold the entire story, start to finish every event in the book has already been written. The way to think of the timeline of someone’s life, according to Vonnegut’s ideas and my teacher’s careful explanation, is not as a straight line, as we tend to think, but similar to a book. Most importantly, I remember a description of an idea of time, one that may have come from the book itself or possibly my teacher attempting to explain this complex idea. I remember descriptions of the Dresden firebombing, which at the time I didn’t realize was a true historical event. I remember something about aliens and a celebrity named Montana. Now in college, I remember very few things from that first time I read Vonnegut’s novel.
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