Within the first few pages of Slaughterhouse Five, one quickly realizes the novel is more than an anti-war novel. The degree to which Slaughterhouse Five surpasses the standard anti-violence paradigm can be seen through the satirical manner in which Vonnegut deals with the business of time and the instability that is the human memory. By weaving a tale with no discernable pattern of linear thought, Vonnegut’s novel becomes concerned with autonomy in a strictly regulated environment. Using the backdrop of the massacre at Dresden in 1945 as a starting point, Vonnegut introduces the reader to Billy Pilgrim, a despondent anti-hero who becomes ‘un-stuck’ within the timeline of his own life. By utilizing Billy as a medium, Vonnegut cleverly critiques the notion of fatalism in a world of free will.
Slaughterhouse Five commences with Billy announcing that everything in the novel, "more or less" happened (Vonnegut 1). By implying that the events of Billy’s past are subject to scrutiny (in what is to be Billy’s semi-autobiographical recounting of this life), Vonnegut challenges his readers to question Billy’s subjectivity. Relatively quickly in the novel, it becomes apparent that Billy is neither protagonist nor antagonist and falls into the realm of anti-hero. This gives Billy’s character more credibility, seeing as how the often apathetic and sarcastic tone of Vonnegut’s novel cannot be properly channelled through a virtuous hero or a dastardly villain. Slaughterhouse Five, in many ways, falls into a grey area. While neither promoting nor condemning war, Vonnegut pens a story that might as well be "an anti-glacier book" (4). Contained by the parameters of being an ‘anti’-book, Vonnegut tactfully models Billy to be the perfect anti-hero; a protagonist whose qualities are antithetical to heroism. Vonnegut is aware of the fact he is placing Billy on the threshold of liminal boundaries, which disallows the readers to place him in one time or the other. Billy himself becomes a traveler in his own existence, existing everywhere infinity. A hero must have some obstacle to overcome; yet by creating Billy as an exiting entity in all realms, the definition of hero becomes fractured into several indistinguishable areas. These indistinguishable areas promote that every aspect of life subsists within itself, thus allowing humans the ability to choose. This choice becomes the moral of Slaughterhouse Five.
The pivotal moment in Slaughterhouse Five is when the Tralfamadorian aliens abduct Billy and place him in their zoo. Vonnegut describes the aliens as possessing a unique ability to see in four dimensions. The additional dimension in which the aliens can see is time. This subsequently means, the Tralfamadorian aliens have already witnessed their entire lives and their death, thus irradiating the concept of free will and imposing the notion of destiny. Fatalism, the concept that free will does not exist, is the adopted philosophy of the Tralfamadorian aliens seeing as how they do not have the option of aspiring for more. Vonnegut creates the Tralfamadorian aliens as a link between Billy and the plot of the story. As an anti-hero, Billy becomes the vehicle in which Vonnegut challenges the question free will on Earth. The aliens intrinsically possess the means to see their future. By juxtaposing a human who hopscotches through his life against the aliens who have no means in which to change their destinies, Vonnegut brings up the notion of space and time existing simultaneously and infinitely. As one of the Tralfamadorian alien claims, "I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studies reports of one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will" (Vonnegut 109). It is within this quote that Vonnegut reveals the true message of his novel. In a world of options, the absolute last resort should be war.
The reason that the author includes the aliens is to further highlight the importance of the moral of the text as a whole. The idea that war should not be what humans resort to is illustrated through the notion of all realms existing infinitely. If all options are living in a symbiotic universe, then there are undoubtedly other options to war. Vonnegut demonstrates this concept in his work through the anti-hero, Billy, colliding with the Tralfamadorian aliens.
