Time And Free Will In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Another theme that can be found in Slaughterhouse-Five is time, and free will. The first sentence of Chapter Two, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” illustrates the importance of time in the novel. Vonnegut attempts one form of time-travel, memory, in his conversations with O’Hare about the war. But they find that their memories are but fragments, incomplete. So the novel opted to its second option, actual travel through time. Billy Pilgrim learned of Tralfamadorian time, where the past, present, and future exist at once. So he is able to do this. Time in the novel is subjective, or determined by the ones who are experiencing it. The British POWs in Germany, for example, is captured at the beginning of the war. They have established
a “timeless” prison camp. The monotony of daily life, for them, has insulated them from history and the war “outside.” On the other hand, Valencia and Barbara, Billy’s daughter, serve to mark “normal,” lived time. Barbara does not take Billy’s claims of a four-dimensional universe very well, because she perceives life as linear. Billy’s life of hospitalizations and violence present a kind of eternal recurrence. The same events occur again and again. Thus the novel’s time has become the Tralfamadorian time. Events are presented as jumbled, partially recounted and later filled in, and not presented as a direct, linear narrative. Tralfamadorian novels, of which Vonnegut’s might be an imitation, are to be read “all at once,” with “no beginning, no middle, no end.” Because, it is said in the novel, all time can be seen simultaneously. And all events have already happened. Thus “free will” in the novel does not exist. Billy learns, it is up to human beings to enjoy life’s most pleasurable moments. These themes are most evident in the 5th chapter of the book.