Do you have abduction insurance? As outrageous as that may sound, someone like Billy Pilgrim would buy it. Billy claims to have been being abducted by what he labels are Tralfamadorians. They are described as two feet high, green, and shaped like plungers. Tralfamadorians have suction cups on the ground and their arms, which point towards the sky, have a little hand with a green eye in the palm. They practice a peculiar belief about time which refutes what humans call free will. The Tralfamadorians state that humans are the only beings with a concept of “free will”. The belief of free will contradicts the Tralfamadorian theory of time; since the Tralfamadorians are not real and Billy is essentially lying about fatalism, this lie will cause …show more content…
Edgar Derby is an American soldier who was in Dresden with Billy and all the other American prisoners. To keep in the theme of Tralfamadorian fatalism, the fate of Edgar Derby is mentioned at random times all throughout the novel. In fact, it is the second sentence of the book. The relevance is that does not have a sequence just like the Tralfamadorians do not see time as a linear progression. The reader knows that Derby will have a teapot in his possession that is not his and he is tried, court-marshalled, and then executed by a German firing squad. All throughout the novel when Derby comes up in a conversation, Billy looks at him, or even thinks about him, the reader is constantly reminded of what will happen to him in the end. “Each mention of [Edgar] Derby’s fate serves as a reminder that his fate is already an accomplished fact” (Chabot 49). Nothing Edgar Derby could do would change the outcome of his death. While Billy is on Tralfamadore, he realizes that there is no point in worrying about the future, or looking for anything that might explain existence. Billy decides when he comes back that he wants to spread this message to everyone. “[Billy Pilgrim] Appointing himself a missionary, bringing the Tralfamadorian fatalism” (Reed, Leeds 155). During the train car ride, he would look at certain people, and relayed their fate to the reader. When Billy asks the Tralfamadorians how wars can be prevented on Earth. “They …show more content…
It is safe to say that the future should remain a mystery for as long as it can. When explaining to Billy about how the universe will end, the Tralfamadorians tell him why they do not stop it. “He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way” (Vonnegut 128). The universe ends when a Tralfamadorian pilot tests fuel for his spaceship, and as he presses the starter button, the whole Universe disappears. The Tralfamadorians do not stop him because they know he will do it anyway, freeing them of any responsibility. For example, if America knew that they were going to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they would not be as empathetic as they are today because it was supposed to happen. They would say that fate has chosen all those people to die by our hands. The American people can feel justified because they were not the ones choosing those cities that were bombed and lead to the death of 220,000, fate was.
Billy’s newfound beliefs and his attempt to spread the Tralfamadorian theory
Though he was able to escape war unharmed, Billy seems to be mentally unstable. In fact, his nightmares in the German boxcar at the prisoners of war (POW) camp indicate that he is experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): “And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car. Nearly everybody, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away” (79). Billy’s PTSD is also previously hinted when he panics at the sound of sirens: “A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War III at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon” (57). The most prominent symptom of PTSD, however, is reliving disturbing past experiences which is done to an even more extreme extent with Billy as Slaughterhouse-Five’s chronology itself correlates with this symptom. Billy’s “abduction” and conformity to Tralfamadorian beliefs seem to be his method of managing his insecurity and PTSD. He uses the Tralfamadorian motto “so it goes” as a coping mechanism each time he relives a tragic event. As Billy struggles with the conflict of PTSD, the work’s chronological order is altered, he starts to believe
time as a prisoner, Billy learned that humans do not have control of their own free will.
Billy Pilgrim time travels to various moments in his life at random, which suggests he has no power over his mind and the memories that haunt him. He “is spastic in time, (and) has no control over where he is going next” (Vonnegut 43), as he struggles to make sense of his past. Billy’s ability to remember events in an erratic sequence, mirrors the happenings of war. War is sudden, fast paced, and filled with unexpected twists and turns. Billy cannot forget what he experienced during his time as a soldier, and in turn his mind subconsciously imitates this hectic quality of war. This behavior proves that although the war is over, “psychologically, Billy has never fully left” (Vees-Gulani). For many soldiers, especially those who were prisoners of war (POW), it is inevitable that their mind will not be like it once was (Vees-Gulani).
All the tragic events in war that he had to deal with, such as seeing people get killed and wondering why he got picked to live have tainted his life . For Billy, traveling in the Tralfamadorian world, makes him relief of his guilt, such as mentioned of what Billy wants to be written on his tombstone, "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt"[p.122]. Billy’s trauma is so severe that he has to leave earth to heal. Tralfamadorian’s believe that time does not go forward and we cannot die. Billy believes that this can comfort those of the earth that are afraid of death. The other dimension that Billy had got his ideas of forth dimension and Trafamadorians are by the science fiction book of Kilgore Trout. One big evidence that came from Tout’s novel that demonstrates that Billy is lying is when he finds one of Trout’s books that he has never read before. "He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before-years ago, in the veteran’s hospital. It was about an Earthling ma and women who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon212". [p.201] This Kilgore Trout book is the foundation of his imaginary world. As I have mentioned earlier, Billy starts time traveling after
...e past (or future) like Billy. A lot of people do this. They either dwell in the past and aren't able to get over things that happened a long time ago, or they have such a hard time dealing with the present that they choose to live in denial and think everything is just how it has always been. This is a very immature solution to handling the world's absurdities. We don't have the choice to "flip the channels" in our lives like Billy does; however we often flip the channel when the news comes on. But we can't just ignore our problems and expect them to go away. That never works for anybody. Nor does denial, which living in the past is, plain and simple. We have to deal with things in a more mature way. As Vonnegut subtly points out, we have to help the things we can and understand the things we can't, and hopefully we will never lose sight of the difference.
Vonneguts character Billy is showing frequent signs of mental illness throughout the book. Most of the chapters show his delusions in the repeated use of the extraterrestrials, the Tralfamadorians. Many scenes from his travels with the aliens can be seen in different parts of his life that Billy may not have realized he had seen and taken to insert into his own imaginary delusions. Vonnegut gives us many scenes to prove that the Tralfamadorians are just a construct of Billy’s broken mind through the use of Kilgore Trout's science fiction novels and other pieces of his life.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” is a short psychological thriller. The murder of Fortunato haunts Montresor so greatly that he feels the compulsion to tell the story some fifty years after the fact. He appears to be in the late stages of life desperately attempting to remove the stain of murder from his mind. That it is still so fresh and rich in specifics is proof that it has plagued him, “Perhaps the most chilling aspect of reading Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ for the first time is not the gruesome tale that Montresor relates, but the sudden, unpredictable, understated revelation that the murder, recounted in its every lurid detail, occurred not yesterday or last week, but a full fifty years prior to the telling” (DiSanza).
Throughout, SlaughterHouse-Five, Billy, is randomly time traveling. Whenever, Billy want to not deal with reality, he has an out-of-body experience. In his time-traveling, Billy knows the outcome of many events. He can change the outcome, yet he chooses not to.
The people of Tralfamadore tell Billy that humans do not understand time because everything they do is in singular progression. “It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever,” (27). The Tralfamadorians also tell Billy that nothing can be changed because of the structure of how time works. When Billy asks one of the Tralfamadorians about free will the creature responds, “Only on Earth is there any talk of free will,” (86). The people of Tralfamadore say that, “All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is,” (86). With this in mind everything in life is left up to fate there is no chance at free will because every moment is already a moment and no one is capable of changing
However, the books present response to war in a contrasting way. The incorporation of repetition, balance, and the idea of little control of one’s fate display parallelism between Billy Pilgrim and the soldiers of The Things They Carried while still distinguishing the existing psychological and internal contrast between them. When Billy is leading a parade in front of the Dresdeners prior to the bombing, Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim is also not like Pilgrim who is the main character in the “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, although they have same last name. His experience is very horrible in the war, there are just have violence and cruel, like the soldier who is in the “Three musketeers”. Imaginary, a man who just naive and have a great lucky, how can he keep his life in the war, just lucky? It is funny. Thus, though the whole novel “Slaughter-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character, Billy Pilgrim is a contradictory person who has the naive and sane attitude together, in almost time he looks like a child, but his wise can “see” at his speaking and action, likes his speaking “So it goes.” (2) Not only is the indifference to the lives, or the hatred and
Baruch Spinoza once said “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He compared free-will with destiny and ended up that what we live and what we think are all results of our destiny; and the concept of the free-will as humanity know is just the awareness of the situation. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores this struggle between free-will and destiny, and illustrates the idea of time in order to demonstrate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut conveys this through irony, symbolism and satire.
In the novel, Kurt Vonnegut proposes the question of whether free will exist or not. The Tralfamadorians live with the idea of the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension contains occurring and reoccurring events, considering that they believe all moments have already passed. According to the Tralfamadorians, there is only free will on Earth, considering humans only think of time as a linear progression. Billy regresses back to events as a child, and remembers when his father let him sink to the bottom of the pool where he prefers to be, but he was rescued. As a young adult, Billy was drafted into the war against his free will. Even as a soldier in the war, Billy is not taken solemnly by the other soldiers. Billy comes to the conclusion that even if he trained hard, and became a good soldier he’d still die like the other soldiers in Dresden who are much better than him. Billy’s real world on earth seems to be taken into bits and pieces into the Tralfamadorian world where Billy thinks is error free. Although the serenity prayer is directed towards God, Billy directs it towards the Tralfamadorians instead. This prayer is significant to this theme, because Billy is trying to live up to the standards of the Tralfamadorians, which is nearly impossible and
It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I said before, “bugs in amber” (108). Their outlook on time does not lend itself to free will, just as any earthly, deterministic institution. Tralfamadorianism is directly related to and used to critique Christianity in Slaughterhouse Five. In Vonnegut’s Dresden Novel: Slaughterhouse Five, Stanley Schatt reaffirms this idea of free will v.s. determinism, “Since Vonnegut’s novels are usually constructed around two diametrically opposed points of view, it is not surprising that Slaughterhouse-Five is built around the irreconcilable conflict between free will and determinism” (Schatt).
Irving, Washington. “The Devil and Tom Walker”. Elements of Literature: Fifth Course. Austin: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2008. 175-185. Print.