An Overview of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim‘s ability to time travel makes for an unconventional book in Slaughterhouse-Five. The plot is non-linear and the climax is anti- climactic. But common to many other pieces of literature, the secondary characters are disposable. They serve entirely to develop Billy Pilgrim’s Tralfamadorian worldview. Many die, and the few who survive to the novel‘s end never develop as characters themselves anyways. Through the Tralfamadorian concept of time, Billy learns to cope with reality and death. When Billy is adbucted by the Tralfamadorians, they introduce to him their knowledge of the 4th dimension, where one can view every structured moment in time simultaneously.

Essentially, the aliens tell him that every moment in one’s life is laid out for the viewing; free will is an illusion only believed by earthlings. Billy readily embraces this view due to two factors: his proclivity for time travel, which has given him practice in experiencing specific moments of life, and his past encounters with fate.

The actions of several characters strengthened Billy’s belief in the validity of fatalism. One of the only mentions of Billy’s dad is in an incident where he throws Billy in a pool in hopes of teaching him to sink or swim. He sinks to the bottom and resents being saved against his will. During the early months of the war, he pleads with Roland Weary to move on without him. Here Weary forces Billy to continue against his will. Even more conclusive for Billy is the fact that he survived the war.

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He, an unarmed, ill- equipped, and unhealthy college boy lives, while others die in droves. Of special note were the two scouts described as skilled and battle-hardened– they were shot soon after Billy‘s capture. During his stay at the Lake Placid veteran’s hospital, Billy meets Eliot Rosewater and consequently Kilgore Trout. Here Billy learns to accept his newfound worldview wholeheartedly.

Rosewater, a fellow veteran, had found life meaningless after the war; by introducing Billy to science fiction, he believed they could “re-invent themselves and their universe.” The rules of the real universe had proven to be senseless, so finding new rules made more than enough sense. The writings of Kilgore Trout were especially influential; he, oddly enough, wrote on what Billy knew: aliens, the fourth dimension, and time travel. In Billy’s eyes, an obscure sci-fi writer made plenty more sense than a society that could conceive bombing Dresden. When dealing with massacres and death, Billy finds Tralfamadorianism a source of comfort. Death is only a single moment of one’s life. Tralfamadorians can simply choose to dwell on the more pleasant ones. As such, Billy treats no death with special attention. Each and every one, from his father’s to his wife’s, is simply received with an unceremonious, “So it goes.”

Edgar Derby, who the narrator Right up to his own foreseen death at the hands of Paul Lazzaro, he remains serene, even though Billy has every right to protest. To the reader, his murder seems unfair, committed by a man without a single redeemable quality, for a trivial grudge. Billy’s listening audience expresses their outrage, but Billy quells them. His calmness in the face of death emphasizes his embrace of the Tralfamadorian way of life. And in a true Tralfamadorian fashion, the plot continues, and Billy is swept to a different moment in which he is very much alive. In such a universe, even the death of the main character aids in advancing the plot. But just like any other book, the purpose of any character is simply for the benefit of the plot.