Question 3

Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse 5 out of order to show how time no longer exists to Billy Pilgrim. Billy has to live moments in his life randomly and out of order because he has become unstuck in time. He might be in the forest with the 3 musketeers at one moment, then reliving his abduction by Tralfamadorians in the next. Vonnegut also wrote his book in the same style as the Tralfamadorians, who'se books have no story structure and are out of order because they don't beleive in time. The Tralfamadorians also say that Earth is the only planet that has the concept of "free will" because they beleive in time and dont realize that their lives are determined by fate, and that everything has always and will always happen the same way. An example of this is how the Universe ends. The Tralfamadorians are experimenting with new rocket fuels and push a button, then the Universe ends. Billy asks if they can stop the Universe from ending, but they say that the button will always be pushed. This is why Vonnegut says "so it goes" every time a person dies because they were always going to die at that moment in time and it could not be prevented. This is also shown by the way that Billy relives his life. He goes to a moment in time, but he has to relive it in the same way because he cant change anything. If he had the ability to change something, than it would always have been changed and all the later events in his life would always have been different, which would not be possible because he is constantly reliving those events the same way they were originally, so he couldn't have changed them earlier.