![]() ![]() He struggles to get the light on, a symbol for the broader struggles that he and every other human being faces in the machine-filled world. The narrator is trying to turn on the light in his car so that his companion, Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer, can see him. These thoughtful lines come from Breakfast of Champions. So I had no choice but to continue to speak from darkness. I pulled at another switch, and it came away in my hand. My view of the lights of the County Hospital was garbled by beads of water. I turned on the windshield wipers instead. I thought it would be a good idea to let him have a good look at me, and so attempted to flick on the dome light. They are animalistic in a way that true animals, like the bird, are not. Still, nothing has been resolved regarding war and what happens next in humanity’s seeming quest to destroy one another. The phrase “Poo-tee-weet” appears yet again, marking Billy’s hard-won freedom. These are the last lines of the Slaughterhouse-Five. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet? There was only one vehicle, an abandoned wagon drawn by two horses. There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind. But, their philosophies were not a revelation to him.īilly and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The quote acknowledges that there are different ways to understand life and that if the Tralfamadorians are right, the speaker is glad that there are a few nice moments in his life that he might revisit from time to time. The life philosophies of non-linear time and free will aren’t really that interesting. Despite the experience Billy has had on Tralfamadore, the narrator (Vonnegut) is not impressed. These lines feature in Chapter 10 of Slaughterhouse-Five. Still–if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice. If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Billy also learns about the non-linear time during his captivity in the zoo. They are a bizarre group of people who have a wacky concept of life and time. To emphasize how strange it is, the speaker says that Earth is the only place where anyone ever talks about free will. There is no such thing as free will in their world. They live in four dimensions and believe that every moment is out of control for the person living it. He’s listening to his new captors talk about time and what it means to be alive and “unstuck” in time. Billy has been captured by aliens and placed in a zoo. These lines are spoken by one of the Tralfamadorians in Chapter 4 of Vonnegut’s most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will. If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. ![]()
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