"All Moments, Past, Present, and Future, Always Have Existed."

In chapter two from "Slaughterhouse-Five", the reader gets to know Billy Pilgrim. He was born in Ilium, New York, and then studied optometry for a while. However, he was soon called for military service in Germany, forced to halt his studies. After being in the army, he married, had two kids, and became a successful optometrist. During his entire life, Billy was able to travel through time, from before he was born until the moment he died.

The prevailing theme in this novel is time. The narrator seems to perceive it as something made-up by humans, implies that there is no way to measure it, and even defies it. Billy claims to have been abducted by aliens from a planet called Tralfamadore, but nobody noticed because Tralfamadorian years are equal to a microsecond on earth. This reminded me of "The Chronicles of Narnia", where the little girl visits Narnia for the first time, but her siblings won't believe her because days in this unknown land are equal to a few seconds in their world.

Tralfamadorians taught Billy a very important lesson, which he wishes to disperse through the rest of society. They are able to go to the moment in time they desire, demonstrating that "it is an illusion we have on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever." It is the other way around: every moment has always been there and will forever be there.

This will seem geeky, but I've always been interested in time travel. I constantly analyze it and have thought about the Tralfamadorian theory, where everything is happening at the same time. If this were the case, the French Revolution, the Big Bang, World War I and II, etc. would al be taking place at the exact same time, but we woud just be aware of one event happening at that instant. Although very unlikely, this could be the case, we could all be living in many places at once. It is a topic very hard to understand, and probably impossible to grasp. However, by addressing it, Vonnegut makes a point and gives the reader something to think about.