You can open the book to any page, any time in the story and you will be able to experience that event even if it is done out of order. This is the idea of time as a fourth dimension, beyond the three dimensions of space.

Billy Pilgrim’s Struggle with PTSD in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. In order to illustrate the devastating affects of war, Kurt Vonnegut afflicted Billy Pilgrim with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which caused him to become “unstuck in time” in the novel.

In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut is able to unify a non-linear narrative by using time travel. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s main character, is constantly traveling back and forth his life experiences “paying random visits to all events in between” (SF 23).

In the novel, events in Billy’s life come and go in no particular order; his pilgrimage is written in no strict chronology. The most important happenings in Billy’s life related in Chapter Two concern his World War II experiences. A summary of these army experiences leads to Billy’s first encounter with time tripping.

Being Unstuck in Time in Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut The concept of being “unstuck in time” refers to a person living from one moment in life to another instead of the day-to-day one we live today.

LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Slaughterhouse-Five, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. Vonnegut uses science fiction and aliens as means of knitting together events in Billy Pilgrim’s life, and of enabling philosophical discussions about the nature of time and death.

There is something tragic about the pointlessness of Wild Bob speaking his dying words to a boy who’s not even in his regiment. His death corresponds to the novel’s general sense that the big issues of World War II—Nazis, anti-Semitism, fascism—have totally passed certain soldiers by.