Towards the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five, I was pretty convinced that Billy was some whacko who suffered from some kind of postwar insanity. I thought that Billy was constantly remembering his past memories of war only because of how scarred he was by the war. As the book went on, however, I started to believe that Billy was actually reliving his past memories of war. In a way, he was always time travelling to earlier periods of his life, although he never knew which period of his life he would be acting in next.
Until recently, I thought that Billy was always time traveling back in time from the present (it's pretty difficult to pinpoint the present in the book, but I believe it is right after Billy's article on the Tralfamadorians is published). But in a recent reading, Billy explains the entire scene right before his death and narrates exactly how he will die. It should be impossible for Billy to know the "future" if he's reliving events from his past. So, once again, I had to change my theory.
It was then that I finally took Billy seriously when it came to how he believed time works, that is, how the Tralfamadorians say time works. If we are to apply the way time works as the Tralfamadorians claim it works to Slaughterhouse Five, everything makes sense. There is a sense of the present, but time doesn't work linearly. This explains why Billy is always nonchalantly accepting what happens to him, because he already knows how everything is going to end anyway. This also explains why Billy is physically ageing like a normal human being as time goes by but always seems to be at the same mental level throughout all his time.
My final theory in a nutshell: There is a present in Slaughterhouse Five but there isn't a linearity to Billy's life, thus Billy experiences/ re-experiences moments of his life at random and already knows the outcome of his life.
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