Slaughterhouse: The Understanding of Time and the Concept of Free Will

Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut

"'Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber," (Vonnegut, 86).

When Billy Pilgrim is abducted by the Tralfamadorians, he is introduced to a radically new concept of time. Yet, this new concept cannot be fully explained to him because the Tralfamadorians are not beings who are capable of sufficient explanations. However, this new view of time becomes part of Billy's mentality and affects the organization and the plot of the story in general. For example, the novel jumps from point to point in Billy's life, with the events sometimes being more than a decade apart. There seems to be no transition between these moments which exemplifies the Tralfamadorian idea that time is seen like "a stretch of the Rocky Mountains," without gaps and without a change in view (Vonnegut, 85).

Along with this radical view of time is the radical concept that free will is strictly a human concept. The Tralfamadorians suggest that the idea of free will is something created by the humans to offer an explanation to the inexplicable. The Tralfamadorians believe that everything that is planned to happen, including war, is unavoidable. This helps to justify the phrase "so it goes" which so consistently follows any mention of death, whether literal or figurative. By using such a phrase, the path of time is allowed to continue without question; there was nothing that could have altered the outcome of an event, and, therefore, there is no sense in questioning the cause of the event. This directly affects the character of Billy Pilgrim and gives him his lessez-faire attitude about death and the war.