Throwing Chronology out the Window

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

In a conventional novel, significant events occur in a linear fashion, one after the other, with the occasional flashback to provide exposition or expound on why a particular event holds meaning.  However, Slaughterhouse-Five is not a conventional novel.  After laying the basic sequence of events in Billy's life toward the beginning of the novel, Vonnegut takes his reader on a temporal roller-coaster ride, describing Billy's sporadic time travels to important moments in his life.  This unconventional chronology helps to support Vonnegut's overall purpose of opposing war in the modern world.  The chronology emphasizes the disorderly state of Billy's mind and the psychological scarring he endured from his time in the army.  His time travels reflect the scattered thoughts of man broken by atrocities.  Frequently, Billy time travels back to the war to experience a scene relevant to his current situation.  For example, after attempting to open up to Rumfoord in the hospital, "Billy closed his eyes, [and] traveled in time to a May afternoon, two days after the end of the Second World War" to experience the aftermath of Dresden once more (Vonnegut 193).  He finds comfort in observing the events again, rationalizing them as significant to his present life rather than being meaningless scenes of horror and death.  Furthermore, by traveling through time, Billy is better able to cope with the mass amount of death he faces.  Rather than mourning each death and allowing the culmination of it all to crush him, Billy must acclimate himself to the idea.  He does so by adopting the Tralfamadorian perspective on death so that when a person dies, he does not see them as lost, but merely existing in a different state.  The person is still alive to Billy, but at a different moment in time, a moment which he can visit as often as he likes through the mentally fabricated gift of time travel.