What is the significance of time-travel in Slaughterhouse-Five?
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Bruce Bergman
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Time-travel works on at least two levels or toward two purposes in this novel.
1. Time-travel is a thematic element of the novel, relating to notions of fragmented self/identity and to the persistence of memory as it emerges (uncontrollably) in the present. Billy cannot remain in one moment just as the narrator/Vonnegut character is drawn to re-live the past while living in the "present". Both these figures are challenged to...
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