Unstuck In Time

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

One of my friends recently reminded about KV's most popular work, as titled above. Well, I took liberties to shorten the full title, which is Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death. Of course, you can find out why such a title was given to the novel, but you have to pay attention! This clues you in as to what type of author Vonnegut is. A GREAT ONE.

The novel follows Billy Pilgrim, who, by means of an accident, has become "unstuck in time," and can travel to different points in his life and experience them first-hand, second-handly. Lots of things ensue. One such thing is that he gets kidnapped by Tralfamadorians. These are aliens that can see in four dimensions (time included!). They can, like Billy, jump to different parts in their life at any time. So while they have a fatalistic view on life, they aren't sad about death because it isn't necessarily at the "end" of their life. Still with me?

Well, the sketch above is my imagining of how Tralfamadorians see humans. The book describes it as "a human millipede with a set of baby legs at one end and old person legs at the other."

This created a very interesting image in my head! I've remembered it from when I first read it, back in early high school. Fun!