Time Travel In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim spends most of his time traveling from present to past, and back and forth. Everyone who met Billy assumed he’d lost his mind or was simply speaking nonsense. However, according to Billy’s story as told by the narrator, there is evidence that suggests there’s a possibility Billy did in fact time travel; Billy’s reaction to the barbershop quartet’s singing during his eighteenth wedding anniversary in 1964, the presence of a framed quote in Billy’s office, and the return of the picture of the woman and the pony. These are instances in which time has repeated itself in a peculiar way that gives rise to the likelihood of Billy’s adventures being true. In 1964, two days after meeting his favorite author, Kilgore Trout, Billy and Valencia held a party for their eighteenth wedding anniversary. As the barbershop quartet sang “That Old Gang of Mine,” Billy became upset and extremely uncomfortable. As Vonnegut wrote, Billy’s odd behavior is later explained in 1968 while in the Tralfamadorian zoo when he tells Montana Wildhack about the day of the Dresden bombing. Dresden was destroyed on February 13, 1945. That day in which all the soldier seeking shelter came out, there were four guards who were overwhelmed with astonishment and grief (Vonnegut 179). Billy tells Montana that these

In his office, there was a framed prayer on the wall. It read It was stated that Billy utilized this quote to keep going in life. The strange factor of this is that the same exact quote was also found while Billy time traveled to the Tralfamadorian zoo. Montana Wildhack had a silver necklace around her neck that contained a locket with a picture of her mother and on the outside was the same words This describes another instance in which elements of completely different scenes are intertwined as Billy goes time