The Time Prison

As I read through the chapter I realized that even with Billy's amazing powers to move through his life, he always ended up back in the war. He always goes back there to continue telling the story of what he lived in it and when he became unstuck in time. Even if Billy can´t consciously use his time travel abilities maybe some part in him triggers them like extreme horror or disgust. When he is in the war he sees the rabbi that "had been shot through the hand. " (p.20)

This is a scene most people would attempt avoiding or forgetting. Billy reacted in a different way. Even if it isn't said explicitly in the book it is very likely Billy might have wanted to go to a place of peace, where he could feel home. Incredibly the next scene provides just that. We see Billy in the most common and peaceful places there are, an optometrist office. "Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a jade green mechanical owl. The owl was hanging upside down from a rod of stainless steel. The owl was Billy's optometer in his office in Ilium." (p.20)

I doubt that it is a coincidence for such a gruesome scene would be followed by such a peaceful one. We see this exact same pattern in the end of the chapter. Billy trapped with all the other american soldiers living in such horrible conditions and he being in such a particularly disgusting situation followed by his tramalfadorian kidnap. I haven't read beyond this point yet but I guess it wasn't such a horrible moment. After all they were peaceful beings that were incredibly more advanced than humanity.". Billy Pilgrim nestled like a spoon with the hobo on Christmas night, and he fell asleep, and he traveled in time to 1967 again-to the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore."(p.26)

It is true that we might not have Billy's gift of being able to escape from his living nightmares by have a lucky strike and leaving those horrible moments instantly but we do have similar defensive mechanism similar to those. If an event is too traumatic we simply ignore it and live on with our lives. I think that Billy is showing us a part of human nature. He is showing us by example that it is the nature of humanity to avoid the horrible truths. People would rather live in a cloud where everything is perfect than in the real world for the simple reason that it is too hard to accept it and understand our reality completely with out being mentally harmed. Could it be that our society has so many horrible truths that we live our lives ignoring them with leaving all those suffering them to live in pain? The example of these horrors shown here is war but there are many others we are unconscious of which might be even worse than war. Maybe because of this Billy tries to escape that moment desperately even if he isn't completely knowing of these attempts he sometimes is successful and escapes for a moment but inevitably returns. He does this because he has live what happened at that point in the war. Even if the ours on that train are eternal he will be trapped in there until the time for him there has passed. That is why that particularly horrible moment in war was like a time prison for Billy one that not even with his time traveling powers he could escape.