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