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.