Vonnegut has taken great care to date precisely various incidents and stages in the life of Billy Pilgrim [in Slaughterhouse-Five] and just as much care to date the appearances and intrusions of the narrator, who insists on at least a partial identification with Billy and becomes himself a character in the novel. Ultimately this observation leads to the realization that imbedded in the telegraphic, schizophrenic manner of the tale is a considerably detailed biography of Billy Pilgrim and that time-travel, together with the other science-fiction components of the novel, is a brilliant psychological technique devised by Vonnegut to interpret the life and philosophy of his created character. (p. 71)

Perhaps I attach too much importance to Vonnegut's biographical accuracy, but I have reason to believe that one's comprehension of the meaning and the aesthetic form of the novel may depend to a great extent on the isolation of Billy's biography.

The biographical path will lead, for example, to three corresponding points of time in the lives of Billy and the narrator that must be characterized as deliberate juxtapositions of salient events, functioning as elements of a conscious structural pattern of the novel, designed to signal the distance between the created character Billy and his creator Vonnegut and to alert readers to Vonnegut's critical but—as shall be seen—sympathetic and compassionate evaluation of, Billy's response to the cruelty of life.

The first point of time is 1964. In that year Billy was forced to remember Dresden; he was not even aware of his inability to remember, so deeply in his subconscious had he buried a memory of Dresden. Vonnegut, too, was unable to remember, but he was aware of that inability and actively sought to overcome it. In 1964, Kurt Vonnegut visited his war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare for the express purpose of recalling Dresden. (pp. 71-2)

In 1967, the second point of time, Vonnegut's attempt to remember Dresden actually took him back to that city, whereas in 1967 Billy was kidnapped by a flying saucer and taken to Tralfamadore, "he says." More precisely, he escaped to a "planet" created in his own imagination in order to avoid his human responsibilities as surely as Vonnegut, together with O'Hare, in 1967 traveled on his real planet Earth to Dresden in an act of human responsibility. (p. 72)

The year 1968 is the climactic year: it brings the biography of Billy to its last moment in the narrative present (beyond 1968 there is only Billy's vision of his death in 1976), and it brings Vonnegut to the present moment of writing Slaughterhouse-Five…. The import of the juxtaposition of the creative acts engaged in by Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim in 1968 seems clear: Vonnegut is writing a novel that rejects the Tralfamadorian philosophy while Billy is actively disseminating that philosophy, first preaching it orally on the all-night radio program and then by writing letters to the Ilium New Leader. The chronological correspondence works out with highly suggestive accuracy. (p. 73)

Billy's total incapacity to understand the significance of the death of human beings clearly distances him from Vonnegut. In effect, Vonnegut says in answer to Barbara's question—"Father, Father, Father—what are we going to do with you?"… that nothing can be done with Billy. (p. 74)

The reasons why Billy Pilgrim withdraws from humanity are clearly implicit in his isolable biography. In it, one can trace his indoctrination to the cruelty of the world and discover that his withdrawal from humanity was virtually complete well before Billy witnessed the firebombing of Dresden. As emotionally wounding as the Dresden holocaust may have been to Billy, it served largely to confirm a conception of life and death already a part of his being…. He had been "alarmed by the outside world" nearly since birth…. (pp. 74-5)

Though in the narrative sequence Billy's—and the doctors'—belief that he is going crazy does not surface until 1948, even at the age of twelve, in 1934, Billy had undergone the real crises of his life, had found life meaningless even if he could not then articulate that concept, and was in desperate need of reinventing himself and his universe. Vonnegut's biographical exposition of Billy's formative years implies that Billy was at twelve already well on his way to Tralfamadore. Here is the true time-travel of the novel: a linear, chronological development clearly based on a cause-and-effect relationship. The child is indeed the father of the man who searches for a prelapsarian Eden. And readers are in the presence, not of science fiction, but of profound satirical fiction probing the condition of modern man.

A brief examination of the implications of Billy's formative years shows that although Vonnegut is intensely concerned about World War II and the Vietnamese War, the novel transcends any specific events of our time. Vonnegut's ultimate concern is to question the origin and the viability of the myths man lives by and finally to reject any new lie that deprives man of his dignity and his life of significance. In this sense, Slaughterhouse-Five is a profoundly religious novel. (p. 76)