Kilagore Trout's Trafalmadore.

Is Billy Pilgrim a thief who constantly steals stories from others? Or is he just an old war veteran who suffers from post war trauma? Billy's "experiences" with time travel and Trafalmadore are very similar to the ideas seen on Kilagore Trout's novels. The Big Board, a book by Trout, exhibits the life of two earthlings, who are captured by a flying saucer to then be taken into a zoo for display on an extraterrestrial planet. Huh? Isn't this similar? Where else have you seen this bizarre idea before? Aa! In Billy's anecdotes about his random visits to Trafalmadore. Hmm. Nonetheless, Billy's random time travel began the night his daughter got married, not so long after his release from the Veterans Hospital, the place where he started reading Trout's stories.   

I think the book is just a part of Billy's imagination. He has a lot of trauma from World War II, and his complicated life. Billy believes just traveling through time is part of his destiny, he is destined to do this and that, and then to just die. So it goes.I think, he is just absent minded, and navigates through his old and rusted memories of war, confusing them with time travel. It's like a child eagerly waiting for the letter of acceptance from Hogwarts, even after their eleventh year of life. Unconscious from the fact that no owl got lost, just that he is not going to receive any kind of letter, but acting as if he has, and is going to Hogwarts.

The book procedes from the future to the present, to the present to the future, from the present to the past and vice versa. All the book is seen from the eyes of Billy, and a narrator just tells us every thought in Billy's mind, as Billy doesn't narrate the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five provides the reader an insight of what war is, and an experience of the damage it can have on a person, such as the prolonged effects it had on Billy. It shows the reader how easy people come and people go; how death is absolutely ordinary in wartime, and how people don't care if others die, the only thing that matters is that they survive during those horrid moments.

Kurt Vonnegut Vs. Billy Pilgrim

Does Billy Pilgrim represent someone else?

While reading a post from Perfection is a Matter of Perception, by Ana Maria Villaveces I realized we both had similar thoughts. There are many things in the book that make us connect Kurt Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim. Sometimes I think if they are the same person and Vonnegut incorporated his own person inside Billy Pilgrim, adding in its way different details, emanating from his imagination. 

I have to disagree with Ana Maria when she says that the most probable situation is that Billy is a different person from Vonnegut. She has to look outside the context, search for any sort of connection between them, which actually are many. Both, Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut enlisted in the US Army. Both witnessed the Dresden bombing, and both where locked inside a slaughterhouse, incidentally number 5.Therefore, I strongly believe that they are both the same person, and that Vonnegut is just narrating to us his story. I think that the person from chapter 1, is Kurt Vonnegut himself narrating how he wants to write a story about the Dresden massacre, and actually starts writing it in chapter two. Basically the first chapter of the novel, is sort of a preface, introducing to us the actual story. 

"I, Billy Pilgrim, will die, have died and will always die on February thirteenth, 1976"

Have you ever thought of knowing the future? Would you choose to see your future, and even know the date of your own death? Wouldn't you be curious if you had the opportunity of knowing? I would be, and Billy Pilgrim has been given this opportunity by the Trafalmadorians. Many people would think, how lucky he is to know the future, but actually is it really that "cool"? Knowing something and not being able to stop it is terrible, being able to count the days you have left with your loved ones, becoming eager as the date approaches. I believe it’s a terrible thing, interesting in some ways, but knowing your fate is not part of our lives. We become who we want to become, but what if you become who you are destined to become. What if the future you have the chance to watch is you dying from the death penalty? Knowing that eventually you’ll do something you have no control over, just to do as destiny says.

I think of the kind of situation, in which you know the outcomes and you know what is going to eventually happen, but find yourself without a voice; Unable to speak up and change things. Such as a criminal, a victim and a silent bystander, something very common in life. The poor bystander has no control of what is happening, because if he dares to come closer he might end up dead next to the first victim, or they’re silenced by a threat.

"Don't worry. It will never be bombed."

Dresden, through World War II, was an undefended city, free of threats of being attacked; it had never had suffered any mayor damage, until February 13 1945, when it was throughly bombed by the allies. The bombing lasted around two days and Dresden was destroyed almost to ashes. Thousands of people died, innocent people who didn't deserve to die. People who where on their way home to meet their family after work, just to enjoy a happy dinner, while praying to their God they had survived this awful time of war. Only to be stoped dead by a never-ending rain of missiles. 

"You don't need to worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance." - Chapter 6, page 146

This quote reflects the irony and black humor in "Slaughterhouse-five". What a perfect target for the allies than to bomb an undefended, open city? If the main objective of theirs is to exhibit power, why not do so by killing thousand of lives in a place that is easy to attack? It's a flawless strategy, however an inhuman one. I have always thought of war as an event filled with cruelness, evil and desire for power. It is something that will never be justified, I mean, how can someone justify the death of thousands of people just for the greater good, or just to prove a point. Do we humans always have to seek violence as our main alternative? Is it in our nature? is it an instinct?  I do not know the answer but something has to be the reason. Nonetheless, the ones who declare war are not actually the ones fighting it; I imagine how small, irregular, and short wars would be if the leaders themselves fought them. It would be unwise, but more human.