Slaughterhouse Five Analysis

Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, recounts the unique life of Billy Pilgrim as he ventures back and forth through time. As an American who participates in World War II and has an unusual relationship with outer space creatures known as Tralfamadorians, Billy Pilgrim leads a secretly exceptional life. Following no particular order, Billy Pilgrim explores multiple excerpts of his life: going back to moments of his childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and death. As an individual “unstuck” in time, he simply relives moments of his life repeatedly, knowing everything that is to come. Due to this, the story does not follow any chronological order. Vonnegut’s distinctive structure of Slaughterhouse-Five emphasizes the relativity of time when one’s existence depends on fate.

In his piece, Vonnegut describes Billy Pilgrim’s life as a patchwork of events that do not necessarily correlate; thus showcasing Billy Pilgrim’s evident lack of free will. As a rather pathetic character, often “guided by dread and the lack of dread” (92), Billy Pilgrim lacks any self-motivated or available control over his life. This is demonstrated by his inability to govern what moment of his life he visits next or for how long. For example, Vonnegut sustains the effect that there is no scheme organizing the moments as Billy lives them by including random episodes of his life that have no relationship to others. From an old Russian prison, he zooms “back in time to his infancy” (107), later waking up on a Tralfamadorian spaceship before going back to being “a middle-aged optometrist” (108) playing golf. Waking up on Tralfamadore with a nebulous recollection of prior events, the Tralfamadorians explain to Billy that the concept of free will is solely ma...

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...a bond between Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, and Vonnegut, the narrator. However incoherent the several sections of the novel may appear to be, repetition serves as a nexus between the multiple episodes; thus highlighting the novel’s deliberate structure.

To conclude, the author’s intricate construction of Billy Pilgrim’s life showcases the impact a lack of free will has on the way one perceives time. Tralfamadorians, consequently, believe that “there is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.” (112); they would rather view the magnificence of several moments at once. Vonnegut reflects this concept and appreciation of time in the novel’s structure: through Billy Pilgrim, a pitiable character who lives his life as a bystander, Vonnegut explores the effects of fate in a world without constraints in time, an infinite world.