![]() The events in the novel may be just happening “in his head,” and much of his story of abduction appears to be strongly influenced by other events in the novel. ![]() The time travel is a result of a memory impacted by trauma, and the alien story is a coping mechanism.īilly’s claims of abduction by aliens only begin after recovering from a serious head injury from a plane crash. Vonnegut uses science fiction and aliens as a means of stitching together events in Billy Pilgrim’s life, and of enabling deeper discussions about the nature of trauma, time, and death however, can Billy really time travel, was he kidnapped by aliens? Either choice results in interesting implications, including those scientific. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. ![]() The Tralfamadorians can see in four dimensions, including time, and teach him thatĪll moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. On top of this ability to time travel, he also claims that he was abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.īilly is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. Early in the novel, we find that he hasīilly has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. After incredibly surviving many hardships, he even makes it through the Dresden firebombing, as did Vonnegut. He is sent to fight against the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and is promptly captured by a small group of German scouts. Those who sought refuge underground often suffocated as oxygen was pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perished in a blast of white heat and either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid.īut back to the novel: Billy Pilgrim, a funny-looking optometry student who gets drafted to enter the military, is the main character of Slaughterhouse-Five. As the updraft mushrooms, strong gusty winds develop around the fire, directed inward, indeed sucking fleeing victims back into the fire. ( MN, vi)Īs a horrific aside, the science of fire storms: it is a conflagration that attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system as a result of the “chimney effect” as the heat of the original fire draws in more and more of the surrounding air. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one another, became one apocalyptic flame. And then hundreds of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen underground. There were no particular targets for the bombs. High explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945. It is elsewhere, in the introduction to his Mother Night, that he does provide details in a way that only Vonnegut can: Now, at last, he finished the “famous Dresden book.” (4)Īmazingly, he does not even really describe details of the bombing but dances around the event in a highly imaginative novel, opening with the classic “All this happened, more or less” (1) that bounces around in time, slowly filling in the missing puzzle pieces as he goes. The traumatic event of his survival and aftermath is probably the most important thing that ever happened to Vonnegut, and, as he writes in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, he’d been trying to write a book about Dresden ever since. Their address was this: ‘Schlachthof-funf.’ Schlachthof meant slaughterhouse. Before the Americans could go inside, their only English-speaking guard told them to memorize their simple address, in case they got lost in the big city. Vonnegut survived with other prisoners holed up in a meat locker deep beneath the city under a building withĪ big number over the door of the building. By Dan Pyle in Physics on October 18, 2017ĭuring World War II, at the age of 23, Kurt Vonnegut was captured by the Germans and ended up imprisoned in the city of Dresden, “the Florence of the Elbe.” He was there when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people.
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