Tralfamadorian In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

In this passage of his novel Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut describes the Tralfamadorian approach to writing a book and cleverly expresses his disapproval towards their mindset that accepts everything as unchangeable and avoids the problem. Tralfamadorians have the ability to view all periods time simultaneously, so they see all of time as already predetermined. Consequently, they write their books with episodic storytelling to make one holistic image of life as beautiful and deep. Since they believe they cannot change how events go, their approach to life is to only at the “marvelous moments” and ignoring anything upsetting. So, to them, the holistic image of life in their books are always happy ones. Since to them time is predetermined, cause and effect become meaningless and therefore can be disregarded. Consequently too, no morals can be learnt from a story, since they cannot change anything in a predetermined world. …show more content…
Contrary to there being no “particular relationship between all the messages”, it’s clear that Vonnegut believes war is ugly with the many references of death and absurdities in Billy’s experience in the war. The reader may believe that Billy’s episodic time leaps emulate the alien’s episodic template, but the time leaps actually serve to present the idea that war destroys and consumes the participants, since he has no control over his time