Slaughterhouse Five

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time travel chaos. He isn’t using his time travel wisely and has not been using it the way he wants to be, going on adventures he doesn’t want to or showing up at the places he wishes he wasn’t at. “He did not travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly.”

Billy’s first time using time travel he saw his whole life flash in front of him. Then he started to realize how to use it, he saw his birth and death as well as other important events in his life. “Billy says that he first came unstuck in time in 1944, long before his trip to Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians didn’t have anything to do with his coming unstuck. They were simply able to give him insights into what was really going on.” Billy was captured by the Tralfamadorians when he started to use time travel and realized what he used it for and what its purpose was. Billy learned a lot about the Tralfamadorians when he was captured such as how they use time travel and how he can use it to benefit him. “Billy Pilgrim had stopped in the forest. He was leaning against a tree with his eyes closed. His head was tilted back and his nostrils were flaring. He was like a poet in the Parthenon.This was when Billy first came unstuck in time. His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn’t anybody else there, or anything. There was just violet light—and a hum.” Billy realizes that he has become “unstuck’’ and starts to see his whole life flash in front of him, witnessing his death, birth, and other big moments.

Billy was then captured by tralfamadorians who also saw life the same way that Billy does. They see in the fourth dimension, but the tralfamadorians only see the good things in life when they time travel “ The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” Billy learned a lot about how the tralfamadorians lived when he was captured by them. They use their time travel skills for different purposes than Billy, by looking at all the good things in life instead of seeing the bad things such as death. “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is so it goes.” “So it goes” is a very common phrase throughout the book that gets used when death is around or has happened. The tralfamadorians use their time travel to help them cope with the death of people or other tralfamadorians by always looking ahead to the future or past when the person is alive. When Billy gets captured by the Tralfamadorians he takes on their lifestyle and the way that they use time travel. He starts to see the good things in life and learns to not let death affect him. So it goes is a play on Vonnegut’s use of black humor. He uses black humor to disguise the sadness of death and create a laughing matter in someone.

Throughout the book Vonnegut displayed the theme of Billy not being stuck in time by using repetition, time travel, and black humor. He used those themes directly to also show the real character of Billy Pilgrim which could also be argued as how Vonnegut acts in everyday life.