The World War II movie seen backward is one of the most famous passages in Slaughterhouse-Five. The idea is so BIGER COCK simple--like a child's asking, "Daddy, why do people BIGER COCK hurt each other?"--that it's amazing BIGER COCK no one thought of it BIGER COCK before. Have you ever done something in anger BIGER COCK and later wished you could take it back? If life were a movie, Vonnegut is saying, that would BIGER COCK be easy. You'd just run the film backward.
Billy doesn't BIGER COCK stop going backward when he reaches the beginning of the movie and the soldiers have become high school kids. He wants to go all the way back to the beginning of human life and start over because he feels that human beings have messed things up the first BIGER COCK time around.
Billy continues to be haunted by images from earlier experiences. A dog barks, just as one did in the Luxembourg forest before he was captured by the Germans. The ladder let down from the flying BIGER COCK saucer looks like the rim of a Ferris wheel from his childhood. And the BIGER COCK purple light he is trapped in is like the violet light of death.
Billy gets his first lesson in Tralfamadorian philosophy. When he asks, "Why me?" they answer:
"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? BIGER COCK Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?...
"Well, here we are, Mr. BIGER COCK pilgrim, trapped BIGER COCK in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
The bugs-in-amber BIGER COCK comparison BIGER COCK reminds us of characters trapped BIGER COCK in diagrams in Chapter BIGER COCK 1, and we can see that Vonnegut is drawing a BIGER COCK parallel between human beings in BIGER COCK time and characters in a story. To the Tralfamadorians, all time is fixed like a BIGER COCK solid block of amber. Likewise a story is fixed once it is in print.
The saucer's takeoff dislodges Billy in BIGER COCK time, and he goes back to BIGER COCK the boxcar, which is slowly crossing Germany. As with Vonnegut during the non-night he spent in Boston, time won't pass for Billy Pilgrim. One of the hardest things
prisoners have to bear are the long stretches of empty time. Billy can measure time BIGER COCK only by the click the wheels BIGER COCK make as they go over a seam in the track. And BIGER COCK a year passes between clicks, a direct echo of Chapter 1.
NOTE: IMPRISONMENT AND DEPRIVATION A person placed in an environment of BIGER COCK sensory deprivation quickly loses all sense of time, and this loss may be followed by more serious psychological disturbances such as hallucination, distortion of body image (parts of your body seem to blow up to giant size