Chapter 4

Chapter 4

On Billy's daughter's wedding night, Billy spends the night watching a documentary over and over again. Everything goes forward then backwards in the documentary. Such as bullets that had at one point hit a man, reversed back. As he is watching this drunk, he imagines Hitler becoming a baby and all of humanity works toward creating two perfect people named Adam and Eve. Before this he knew that he was going to be kidnapped by aliens and soon afterwards, he is. On the spaceship, he travels back in time where he is again in Germany. During the trip, a man dies in another cart while telling everyone that Billy is responsible. Billy is transported back into time when he was a child then forward when he is a middle aged man playing golf.

The entire chapter seemed to remind me of One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is because in chapter 3, a voice comments that only on earth is there free will. Ironically, the entire chapter shows that there is no free will. The way time works in the chapter also reveals Vonnegut's belief in fate and how it must be followed through. Billy's death is marked already, like the fate of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Billy's lack of thinking past "Why is this happening to me", also reveals that humans are selfish and limited creatures. Vonnegut shows that humans are consistently worried about themselves and what effects them directly, rather than the world overall. They don't question the "bigger things" but rather piety things that in the grand scheme of things, don't matter what so ever.