Time Is Everything.

I am currently reading Slaughter House-Five. Even tough I am only up to chapter three I have really noticed how time plays an important part in the book I would even take the risk to say that the book revolves around time and the effect it creates on the character Billy Pilgrim. As we start reading we see how the book shifts from one place to another narrating different moment of the characters life. “Billy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was back in World War Two again. ” (Vonnegut,58). I see this as a way for the author to show us that war and what Billy went through has marked him for the rest of his life because almost always when we reading about Billy’s life the author makes a connection (through time) to war.

The fact that the author includes the Tralfamadores also links to the matter of time. “He hadn’t been missed, he said, because the Tralfamadorians had taken him through a time wrap, so that he could be in Tralfamadore for years, and still be way from earth only for a microsecond. ”(Vonnegut 26). This gives us a view of what may be going on in the characters head and how he is not fully aware of the present time he is living in because for him he also live in the other planet where time is measured differently. So it is as if he lived in two different worlds at the same time.

Another detail that relates to time with this book is when Billy says “Where have all the years gone?”(Vonnegut,57). With this quote we can assume that Billy is not content with his life. Sure, he has lived and is aware of that but he still wonders why and where they have gone, because he does not like the outcome that became of those years. It is as throughout the book they are trying to show make us understand how Billy would like to change time, to go back and live again but he can’t change the past nor the future(his destiny) and has to live the present.