Time Travelling: Physically or Mentally?

Is Billy Pilgrim actually traveling through time? Is Billy actually living random moments in his life? Or is he merely out of it? Here is what I think.


In the foreword,Vonnegut informed the readers that when he tried to recollect memories of his experience at the Battle of Dresden, he could not remember any significant details. The author described his memories of Dresden as "useless" and not enough to make a book. This tells us that although Vonnegut lived through it, there were times when he was so shell shocked that a part of him refused to recall the horrible images he has seen.
 
I think that in order to reinforce this idea, Vonnegut set Billy Pilgrim to become constantly "unstuck in time". But is he truly time traveling? I would have to say no. If he could physically time travel, why would Billy not choose to continue playing golf with his friends, or practice optometry rather than return to the times when he was a prisoner of war? Why would he choose pain rather than joy?


From this evidence, I assumed that Billy isn't really time traveling, but merely reliving certain stages of his life while he was in a traumatized state while he was a prisoner of war. This can be known since no matter where he becomes unstuck in time, he would always return to the moments when he was captured. Therefore, I concluded that, like Vonnegut, Billy has large amounts of blank out points during the war when he does not (or does not want to) remember anything significant. During those times, he would choose to focus on those normal (or would be normal) moments in his life to make him temporarily forget the painful state he was in.


However, as delusional as I think time traveling is, Billy Pilgrim himself has a different idea. He truly believes that  he is physically time travelling. Therefore, to him, all of this is real, and really happening to him.

We can conclude that different people would have different opinons. Hence, only one person would truly know the answer to this question, Kurt Vonnegut himself.


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                                                                                           - Yuemin

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This is Yuemin and Nancy's blog on Slaughterhouse-Five. Here, you'll read about our opinons on some passages in this novel. Feel free to comment!

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