A lot of writers in history have written science fiction novels and had excellent good results with them, but only a couple of have been as enduring more than time as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five is a personal novel which draws upon Vonnegut’s experience’s as a scout in Globe War Two, his capture and becoming a prisoner of war, and his witnessing of the fire bombing of Dresden in February of 1945 (the greatest man-caused massacre in history). The novel is about the life and instances of a Globe War Two veteran named Billy Pilgrim. In Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut makes use of structure and point of view to portray the theme that time is relative.
The way Kurt Vonnegut structures Slaughterhouse-5 aids in the portrayal of the theme that time is relative. The novel is broke down into two components: Vonnegut’s story about the novel and the life story of Billy Pilgrim. The life story of Billy Pilgrim which is “presented as a series of episodes with no chronological order” . This mirrors the structure of the novel which has a beginning, middle, and end but not in there respective places. (Dawley 1) Billy states quite a few times in the novel that he has grow to be “unstuck in time” and that the time travel periods ”aren’t necessarily fun”. (Vonnegut 23) Although the reader never leaves the most important plot line of the fire-bombing of Dresden for very lengthy, Billy nevertheless travels alot. Billy ”has observed his birth and death numerous times” and “all the events in between”. (Vonnegut 23) The reader learns that “the things Billy Pilgrim” can not change are “the previous, the present, and the future”. (Vonnegut 60) Many of the time warps are to his later-life as an optometrist. During his life as an optometrist he marries one of his professor’s daughters. Even even though Billy knows ahead of time, simply because he has “seen” the future ahead of it takes place, he knows that he is only marrying her to get funding from her father to start his personal organization. Extra of the time travels Billy has take him to his time on the planet Tralfamadore. Billy says that the aliens abducted him on his daughter’s wedding evening and returned him a few milliseconds later, but in fact commit numerous months on Tralfamadore due to the fact the Tralfamadorians can also see in the fourth dimension, time, which allowed them to maintain Billy for what seemed like longer than what he was truly there. Although on…