Slaughterhouse-five Ch3: Time And Life Will Fly By

Kurt Vonnegut is playing a lot with flashbacks of the war and the mind of Billy. One thing that really helped me get this idea was: “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future”(Slaughterhouse-five pg 60). Kurt Vonnegut might have said this because he meant two things. The first thing he wanted to show us is that Billy is already a person that is unwilling to change his life. The other thing that he might be referring to is destiny. What he is saying is that the destiny of Billy Pilgrim is already written and he can’t do anything about it or change it in anyway. This is reflected throughout the chapter when he tells us how Billy was in the war. Billy is just letting himself go without any resistance just as if he cared no more for life. The same thing is shown when he tells us about his life and how he goes to his house and thinks life has no purpose anymore. I feel some sort of compassion with Billy because after war many things change. It is not that I have been in war but after some very hard times in your life you can change. When my great grandfather died I was very sad and was changed but this event because it taught me that life will not wait for you and it might seem long but it may change in any moment. There is a thing that happened in this chapter that really can associate with our life. “He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium’s black ghetto. The people who lived here hated it so much that they had burned down a lot of it a month before” (Slaughterhouse-five pg 59).This is one of the things I find very absurd that people sometimes do. People will sometimes destroy on what they depend on. Why would you destroy the one thing you want and need most in life? One example of this is when I see people in tennis tournaments that smash their racquets until they break them. It is what you play with and you shouldn’t go around destroying your stuff because you lost a point. You have to value the stuff you have today because you may never know what will happen tomorrow. This chapter has really left me a lesson that is to never take things for granted. One clear example that Billy shows us is when he says: “Where have all these years gone? (Slaughterhouse-five pg 57). That was when I stopped a moment from reading and started to ponder this question. Even though I am not very old as this chapter taught me life can have many twists so I started to wander and think what I wanted to do with my life. Then I realized that was not too far away but I still had some time to make up my mind. Then my mind started to think of my life. I asked myself if my fifteen years had passes quickly or slow and the answer was that they passed quickly. But the lesson that this chapter really taught me is to never take things for granted and that time and life will fly by.