Tralfamadorians are aliens with various concepts that contradict to a lot of "Earthling" ideas. In this novel, Billy Pilgrim interacts with them a fair amount. Throughout his visits back and forth through time, he couldn't help but be influenced by their presence.
Billy, as we've come to know, is a very passive, underwhelming character. He isn't the typical war protagonist we, as readers, would often expect to fill the role of main character. Maybe this odd characterizing has something to do with the Tralfamadorian visits. Billy has surely learned "lessons of Tralfamadore" throughout his lifetime that affect him as we read further (199). One of these "lessons" was that "everybody has to do exactly as he does" (198). This philosophy carries with Billy when he says that he "had found life meaningless"(101). This insuites there is very little choice or purpose in life. Everything is how it is: nothing more and nothing less.
Another Tralfamadorian concept Billy has adapted is the very demonstrated understanding of time. Tralfamadorians believe that "all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist"(27). Billy shows his agreement with this concept on multiple different occasions; one of which occurred in his optometrist office. In the office, Billy explains to a fatherless boy "that his father was very much alive still in moments the boy would see again and again"(135). Billy believes in time as the Tralfamadorians do because of his visiting with them.
What other examples of this topic do you see? What other things impact Billy's dry personality, or is it simply chance?
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