Slaughterhouse-five Ch4: The Past, Present, And Future

Emptiness was the first word that came to my mind when I started to read chapter 4 of Slaughterhouse-five. According to the webpage http://www.thefreedictionary.com emptiness means having no occupants or inhabitants or being vacant and that exact definition came up to my mind when Billy was wondering around his house. "The moonlight came into the hall way through doorways of the empty rooms of Billy's two children, children no more. They were gone forever." (Slaughterhouse-five pg73). When I read these sentences I remembered that grandmother's always said that the house felt empty after the kids have gone. I had never asked this question to my grandmother so I called her and asked her. Her answer was that since my father is the oldest one when he left she did not feel the house so empty but when the other two kids left it felt a very uncomfortable and eternal silence. She also told me that it seemed as if there was a hole in the house. I also thought about this and remembered that after my dog went out for a week to the veterinarian the house felt as if there was no action and it felt empty.

What I found most interesting about this book is that the time shifts are so confusing and frequent that you almost feel the trouble Billy has to remember the things that have happened. Another example is when Kurt Vonnegut shows that the book is going to be full of time twists. He shows this through narrating the war movie Billy was watching backwards. It seemed very weird to read that the bombs came back into the shells and into the plane's belly but maybe this whole book is going to be like that. It will show Billy trying to remember what happened during the war while he is living his life and in the spaceship of the Tralfamadorians. Billy has strange transitions between each setting in his mind because he does them without warning. For example he was in one moment thinking about the shower they gave him in the German camp and the shower when he was a baby and also one in Tralfamadore. In the first chapters I felt strange and couldn't really follow the story with all those time changes but as I am getting used to reading it I now kind of sense when a change is near because he can change on a very small subject or item but there is always a relation between the object and the times. "Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 86). This is one of the questions that have always wondered in my head: What is more important the past present or future? This answer the Tralfamadorian gave me is very similar to the answer I formulate for the present but I really think the past is very important because it is the only way to learn from our mistakes and be able to be better. The future will never be known and I think of it more as a matter of destiny. The past, present, and the future are things very important to us but to Billy the Pilgrim's mind none seem to make any sense.