The book Slaughterhouse-Five is an effort by the author Kurt Vonnegut to try to deglamorize war. He tried to tell people that World War II was not a battle of heroic men fighting heroic men but instead young boys fighting other young boys. These boys would sacrifice their lives blindly for the war effort. Billy Pilgrim is one of these boys. Billy, however, lives his life differently from the rest of us. While we go throughout life chronologically, he slips in and out of periods of his life, in and out of time and lives in that moment. One time Billy was abducted by aliens called Trafamadorians. These aliens experience life in the 4th dimension, time.
"A Trafamadorian sees all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is time it does not change. It does not lend its self to warning or explanation. It simply is. Take it moment by moment." (86).
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Vonnegut wrote the book Slaughterhouse-Five as if it was written for a Trafamadorian. The importance is not put on the middle or the end but in "The depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time." (88) Vonnegut believes that there is no way to avoid war, death, and destruction; however, the importance is placed on how the reader lives in certain moments. The degrees of emotion experienced are what is important and defines the person's character.
This book is written very much in a Trafamadorian style. It does not focus on the entire life of Billy Pilgrim, but instead focuses on certain moments of his life. When humans look at another's life, they do not focus on death but on how they lived their lives as a whole. Trafamadorians view life similarly. .
"When a Trafamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. (27)" .
When Trafamadorians write novels, they realize that their readers, Trafamadorians, are concerned with the moments picked out all at once and the depth of which they are described.
