Kilgore Trout = Tralfamadorians?

Whilst reading “Chapter 5”, I started to get the feeling that there no longer was a relation between time and plot, like in most other books that everything happens in chronological order and that give the book a meaning. I used to think that the main “plotline” was Billy during the war in Germany, and that all the time travels occurred from here, and when they were over he would be back in Germany. But “Chapter 5” was such an entanglement of ideas and moments in different periods of time that I left my original idea behind. Now I see that all the moments are the plot itself, that time plays a huge role in the book, but at the same time is almost insignificant in terms of the plot’s development. I got the feeling that it was almost as if Vonnegut was trying to tell us Billy’s story as a Tralfamadorian book would. If seen as one, it makes complete sense; we would see Billy’s entire life. But we can’t see like Tralfamadorians, so we just see a compilation of random moments in Billy’s life, which don’t follow the traditional chronological order of a plot.

Destiny and the acceptance of it also play a big role in this chapter (actually in the whole book). I realized that Vonnegut exposes in his writing some things that resemble the Tralfamadorian ideology. Not only his writing style, like I described in the above paragraph, but his constant use of the phrase “so it goes” has some Tralfamadorian philosophy in it. Throughout the book it has been explained that these aliens see every single moment, but that each moment can never be altered. Every moment exists, will exist, and has always existed the way it is. So we can merely accept each moment, because everything is predetermined. We cannot avoid war; we cannot avoid anything, not even the end of the whole universe. Which Tralfamadorians have already seen; it’s one of their own who accidentally blows up the whole universe. But as their philosophy goes, that moment has always been that way, so they can merely accept it, and not blame it on them or anyone, it simply is. Vonnegut’s use of the phrase “so it goes” is in fact this philosophy; he can do nothing about the person that just died, he can merely accept it, but not blame it on him. Also, Vonnegut could introduce this ideology into the book due to his war trauma as a way to accept all the tragedies that happened in war.

Another interesting detail that I caught onto while reading “Chapter 5” was the tremendous similarity between Kilgore Trout’s books and the Tralfamadorian ideology. This similarity led me to think that the Tralfamadorians could be simply an invention of Billy’s. Why do I think this? Because Billy starts reading these novels while he is at the mental hospital, during a time in his life where life itself has failed for him. He says it himself; he is trying to rebuild everything around him due to his war trauma. So the fact that he was in such a vulnerable state and that Trout’s novels helped him through it, could easily lead to the conclusion that Billy introduced Trout’s ideas into his new rebuilt view of life.