Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut deals with the concept of time. Billy Pilgrim sees time differently then most people. Billy is schizophrenic so he is not always living in reality, during those times Billy is reliving his past, or just using his imagination. Slaughterhouse-Five shows the concept of time with Tralfamadore, future, and the past.

Tralfamadore plays a large role in Slaughterhouse-Five because Billy Pilgrim spends a lot of time there and the Tralfamadorians teach Billy about the true nature of time. Billy is schizophrenic and some times he thinks he sees objects from Tralfamadore. “He would not raise his eyes to the sky, though he knew there was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore up there.” Billy would travel in time when he was unconscious. When Billy was in the train car going to the prison camp, Billy spent a lot of time in the zoo on Tralfamadore. When Billy is on Tralfamadore, he learns that they see time differently then him. Instead of seeing a normal human being, they see giant millipedes with babies’ legs at one end, and old people’s legs at the other end. Humans think of time as a concept, and measure it with clocks, but Tralfamadorians can look at time like humans look at the Rocky Mountains, They can see the past, present, and future. They say time never ends, and that it is a continuous loop. The Tralfamadorians allow Billy to travel through time, but there is no way he can change anything. Tralfamadore is important to Slaughterhouse-Five because Billy learns about time when he visits there.

Billy travels to the past a lot in Slaughterhouse-Five, usually when he is unconscious. Right before Billy gets captured he becomes unstuck in time. “And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which was red light and bubbling sounds.” (43) After that first experience of being unstuck in time, Billy receives a flood of images from the past including a memory of his dad teaching him how to swim, a memory of his mother in an old folks home, about to die, a memory of a little league banquet and a memory of a New Year’s Eve party. “Now somebody was shaking Billy awake.” (47) Even though Billy is in a very dangerous situation, Billy is asleep on the ground. Usually when Billy travels back in time, it is to important or memorable events in Billy’s past.

Billy travels into the future a lot in Slaughterhouse-Five. The Tralfamadorians told Billy that he could travel in time wherever he wanted, but he could not change anything. Billy asks the Tralfamadorians how the world ends, and they tell him that one of their pilots’ blows up the whole universe and everybody dies. When Billy meets Kilgore Trout, he asks Billy if he has seen the past or future through a time window, and Billy says he never had. Billy also finds out how he dies. He predicts his death will occur in 1976 after Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by the Chinese. Billy gets shot by an assassin’s bullet, 30 years after the death threat. So it goes.

Slaughterhouse-Five shows the concept of time with Tralfamadore, flashbacks, future, and the past. I think time is a major part of Slaughterhouse-Five because Billy spends most of the book unstuck in time, traveling into the past and future.