Although Billy Pilgrim shows signs of human qualities, when he is introduced to the Tralfamadorians, he inherits some of their philosophies. Billy explains his newly found beliefs, “the most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die… Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘so it goes’” (Vonnegut 13). While Billy is with the Tralfamadores, he learns to view death as just another moment throughout a person’s life. In The Meaninglessness of Coming Unstuck in Time, Martin Coleman explains, “Billy Pilgrim adopts the Tralfamadorian view of time, he aligns himself with a traditional privileging of knowledge, wrongly understood, over concrete human experiences” (Martin Coleman 689).
Just like the Tralfamadores, he has the knowledge that death only implies that the person is in pain in that single moment, and it does not mean the person has been in pain all the moment in there life.
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Throughout Slaughterhouse Five it becomes evident that Billy adapts Tralfamadorian’s interpretation of events. Since Billy is unstuck in time, he is able to travel to the moment where he dies. He dies when, “A high-powered is aimed at him from the darkened press box. In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead. So it goes” (Vonnegut 64). Even in the event of his own death, Billy has no major reaction. This is evident from the fact that he only says “so it goes” after his death. Similarly, said in the In the The Arbitrary Cycle of Slaughterhouse-Five, Wayne D. McGinnis reacts to the phrase ‘so it goes’ by saying, “the most important function of ‘so it goes,’ is its imparting a cyclical quality, both in form and content” (McGinnis 59). Billy, like the Tralfamadorians, does not hold any connections to single events in his