Free will... Don't kid yourself

Have you ever imagined that you float through time and space? That no matter what you do, nothing will ever change? No. You probably haven’t. As an Earthling you must believe in free will…

Billy Pilgrim is reliving the night that the Trafalmadorians took him. A flying saucer, “navigating in both space and time” will come for him in an hour. I find it amusing that what he decides to do, knowing what is set to happen, is watch a movie backwards. WWII German warplanes flew over towns cleaning up fires and healing the wounded, until, at the beginning everybody turned into a baby. To me this represents the parallelism that exists between Billy’s life and time. “Billy was unstuck in time”, that phrase has been repeated almost as often as “and so it goes” yet I hadn’t found an explanation beyond the obvious pattern. In this chapter I finally did. When the narrator makes a connection between Billy’s time traveling and a mosquito stuck in amber I felt the “ahh” moment that comes when one finds the answer to something puzzling. The bombs that the airplanes retracted and the spastic time travel visible in Pilgrim’s life were tied together by the effects of Billy’s kidnapping!

The idea of the mosquito stuck in amber reminded me of the movie Jurassic Park. Here, the owner of the new dinosaur theme park recreated the once extinct species by acquiring the DNA that the dinosaur parts that were stuck in amber had. In a way, he is marking that time is circular, he recreates something that was once extinct.

“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is…There is no why.” This excerpt represents fate, as a theme of the novel. “If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings… I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’…Only on earth is there any talk of free will.” The Trafalmadorians say that fate, is what control the universe. Billy embodies that philosophy. He accepts that it is so. He lives having already lived, knowing who will die and who will live. “So it goes,” he says, no longer as a cue for a transition, it now represents his passive attitude towards life, because nothing can change.

As a reader I no longer feel the same anxiety when flipping through the pages of the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five represented freedom, through Vonnegut’s representation of Billy, and through the enigma that was Billy’s train of though. Now However, I am reading a book that just is. “Here we are… trapped in the amber of this moment.”