Illusion Of Free Will Through Billy Pilgrim's Slaughterhouse-Five

Paige Guyton

Mrs. Staker

Enhanced English 10

21 November 2014

The Illusion of Free Will Through Billy Pilgrim Free will is the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate or the ability to act at one's own discretion. Fatalism generally refers to any of the following ideas; the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do. Many people have pondered the idea of whether or not humans have the ability to control the outcome of future events in their life, or if one’s destiny is already fixed and predetermined. Billy Pilgrim is used throughout the entire story of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut to help express the illusion of free will. Over the progression of the novel, Billy’s character develops

Numerous times during the novel, Billy runs up against forces that counter his free will. The common reoccurrence of time travel in the story showed Billy his fate, and progressively changed Billy’s outlook on life. Due to time travel, Billy can see into his future. Billy knows that he will be in a plane crash on the way to his optometrist convention, and that he will be shot my Paul Lazzaro, a man that was hired to revenge Roland Weary’s death. In spite of his knowledge, Billy does nothing to change the way each moment panned out because he knows he cannot control his fate. One constant life force Billy could not control was his stage fright that was caused by his time travel. In the text it says, “Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in constant stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to act in next” (Vonnegut 23). This quote shows Billy’s lack of control and the force of time travel against his free will. Due to time travel, Billy already learned exactly how and when his death would happen. With his new knowledge, Billy never held back in life threatening events because he knew the outcome of his life wouldn’t change. Throughout the novel, Billy always had an indifferent attitude towards life events. The most dominant

Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorians throughout the novel to answer the question whether or not free will exists. The Tralfamadorians believe every event in life is predetermined and they look at the world in four dimensions. They also understand that only humans believe in free will because humans think of time as a linear progression. Billy Pilgrim’s attitude towards fate develops while being in the presence of the Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians abduct Billy and he learns the way they view time and it changes his view of looking at life. When Billy is kidnapped and taken to Tralfamadore, he offers no resistance. He allows himself to be imprisoned and displayed naked in a zoo. He listens and absorbs the Tralfamadorian philosophies without question. In the text it says, “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows