Word: tralfamadorians
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Dates: during 1969-1969
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LISTEN: the most fascinating thing about this book is the way Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian understanding of time to deal with the importance of death. Tralfamadore is the planet 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away, to which Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped. Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments of time in the same way we can look at a whole range of the Rocky Mountains. For those who can travel in time (Billy Pilgrim can and does) any particular moment can be visited. Nothing is "future"; nothing is "past." All moments exist, always have, and always will...
Vonnegut passes on the information that pieces together Billy Pilgrim's life in a Tralfamadorian sense of order, not a chronological one. Instead of telling Billy's life "as it happened," he describes events that might be most enlightening when compared. The actual story of the book depends on the chronology of capture and eventual freedom during World War II. But Vonnegut's ideas don't depend on it--he tells us what the end of the book will be in the first chapter...
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