The foreshadowing of events in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" is as much a subtle indication of things to come as it is a explanatory technique by which the main plot points of the story are clearly described as facts, leaving us to continue to move through the novel and watch helplessly as each of these points is hit, in turn, as promised. However, foreshadowing is more than just a structural technique used by the narrator: it is also a defining aspect of Billy Pilgrim himself – it is part of his character, as his knowledge of future events influences his behavior throughout of the story - and, on a larger scale, foreshadowing is woven into the very fabric of the narrative, for it is a story in which the past, present and future intersect and all the events that produced are known before they take place. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essay "I've finished my war book now," announces the narrator - perhaps Vonnegut himself, although we cannot be sure - in the opening of the novel, and already the end is in sight, because we now know that the story is told in flashback, and that the chronological sequence of events ends with writing of the very novel we are reading. The narrator continues: The next one I write will be fun. This one is a failure, and it had to be, because it was written by a pillar of salt. It starts like this: Listen: Billy Pilgrim has broken away from time. It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet? And sure enough, we turn to the next page to see the novel itself beginning with the words: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has broken away from time", and when we turn to the last page we see the novel ending with the chirping of a bird: "Poo-tee-weet?" Combined with the circular effect of Yon Yonson's song, which ends as it begins and continues indefinitely into eternity, and with the narrator's observation according to which "Someone was playing with the clocks... The second hand of my watch would tremble once, and a year would pass and then it would twitch again" - we see that this is most certainly a structured novel a bit in the schizophrenic telegraphic way of the tales of the planet Tralfamadore But what exactly is this supposed to mean From the first page of the novel, before the story even begins, we are told about the planet Tralfamadore? as if its nature should already be known to us, but only when we are told that it is "where flying saucers come from". Are we then able to infer that this is a place with a civilization that has some importance to history - because we also infer that if the flying saucers are coming from Tralfamadore, they must also be going to to another place, presumably Earth; but nevertheless, these inferences and impressions are all that we can deduce from this abrupt introduction to Tralfamadore. Likewise, we see that the novel is subtitled “The Children's Crusade” – why, we do not know. None of these things have any significance in the story the first time they are brought to our attention, but later when they are explained - such as the planet on which the "fourth dimension" aliens reside and like the title that the narrator promises his character. friend Mary which he will use respectively for his book - in retrospect their significance becomes great. In addition to the method of foreshadowing already mentioned, the foreshadowing of the novel now also takes a more subtle formas the enunciation of certain events, based on the hypothesis of knowledge already acquired rather than on the exposition of knowledge not yet attained. In this case, instead of telling us frankly what is going to happen in the novel, the narrator talks about things that have already happened, thus foreshadowing their possible occurrence later in the story. Vonnegut's dual use of major, precognitive, and minor, retrospective foreshadowing is not a common technique to use for foreshadowing in particular or for fiction in general - unless you come from Tralfamadore. "The most important thing I learned about Tralfamadore," wrote Billy Pilgrim in a letter, "is that when a person dies, they only appear to die. still very much alive in the past. ... All moments, past, present and future, have always existed, always will exist. [Tralfamadorians] can see how permanent moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. The style of the novel therefore reflects the perspectives of the Tralfamadorians, telling us of future events in one case and then presuming that we have already been informed of them in another; sometimes stating specifically what will happen in the future - a more "active" foreshadowing technique - and sometimes assuming that events that will take place in the future have already happened and that we are aware of them, and going from there to talking about them as if they were familiar to us – a more “passive” foreshadowing technique. The effect of both types of foreshadowing is a general feeling of ambivalence toward the future, largely void of any emotional connection to events that have not yet occurred. “His name was Howard W. Campbell, Jr. He would later hang himself while awaiting trial as a war criminal,” the future is written and inevitable, and so on. "Billy predicts his own death within an hour. He laughs about it, inviting the crowd to laugh with him. 'It's about time I died,' he says. 'Many years ago,' he says , 'a certain man promised to get me killed...Tonight he will keep his promise'" and he does, and Billy goes down as he said he would, and his death is expected, planned, premeditated, inevitable. , and so on. We infer this not only from the words Billy uses, but also from the change in tense on the part of the narrator: Billy says "It's high time I died", but he says "Many years ago, a certain man promised to have me killed." " ; we move from the present to the past in the space of a single sentence. Other examples of foreshadowing rely on a similar level of subtlety: "Billy fell asleep as a senile widower and woke up on his wedding day " and "Billy sat in the waiting room. He was not yet a widower" - not yet, but now we know that he will be, and when the time comes when he becomes a widower, we expect it to happen, and the event is once again imbued of a sense of inevitability, and is therefore drained of the emotional power that spontaneity would otherwise provide "That's what happens," the narrator notes every time someone or something dies. t is not a significant event but rather a mere formality, and this thought reflects not only the thoughts of the Tralfamadorians, but also those of the confused, disoriented, and desensitized American soldiers who, like the narrator, were - are - will be captured by surprise during. of the bombing of Dresden. Except one. "Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be blown to pieces and then burned in about thirty days. He also knew that most of the people watching him would soon be dead. go." However, when Billy parades through the streets of Dresden, hepart of a “light opera” – or even more, “Billy Pilgrim was the star [of the light opera]”. Earlier – or later – during his stay at the Tralfamadorian Zoo, Billy asks the Tralfamadorians why they don't have a war on their planet. “Today we [have peace],” a Tralfamadorian told him. "Other days we have wars as horrible as any you've ever seen or read about. There's nothing we can do about it" - once again, emotional detachment from an inevitable future influences this character's behavior and that of the narrator. attitude towards him (or him) - "so we just don't watch [the wars]. We ignore them. ...That's one thing Earthlings could learn to do: ignore the terrible times and focus on the good." So what we have in Billy Pilgrim is a character who is foreshadowing an incarnate, who, equipped with "memories of the future", is able to look with a smile at a city about to be decimated while acting as a " star” instead of taking the opportunity to warn the citizens of this city about the inevitability of their fate. This character's actions are then recounted to us by a third-party observer who earlier described himself as "a pillar of salt", alluding to the biblical account of Lot's wife and therefore lumping himself in with someone who can't help but look back and reflect on the past. This then amounts to a structure in which we first have the observation that in addition to being a novelistic technique on the part of the narrator, the prefiguration is also a character trait which is imprinted in the very essence of Billy Pilgrim, whose knowledge of what will take place is an influence on the things he does and does not choose to do; and second, a comparison between individuals who look at the world as the Tralfamadorians do and those who do not: the narrator, a figure of the present, always focuses his thoughts on the past, and he is opposed to Billy, a figure of the past, whose "memories of the future" allow him to focus his thoughts not on Dresden, even though he is there when it is about to be bombed, but on the good times, and the opera lighthearted is a good time, and this ability to choose which events to focus on allows him to smile and act like a star even though he knows what this city has in store for him. With events foreshadowed in Billy Pilgrim's actual personal timeline, which in turn influence the essence of his character, as well as events foreshadowed in terms of the order of events in which the narrator introduces us to his character, Billy is able to 'escape the misery of Dresden into happier times while on the other hand the narrator, even though he lives in happier times in the present with his old friends, still cannot and will never be able to escape from the misery of Dresden and the misery of the The past, by necessity, defines the entire novel and gives it a framework around which it is structured, and moreover, it allows us to foreshadow in general: future events in a novel of this gender have no meaning without some past indication of the importance of their occurrence; otherwise, it would be nothing more than a simple account of "real life", and the story of a man who "broke away from time" is anything but realistic. The very first chapter, for example, describes the novel as a whole, with a vague and "passive" reference to "the slaughterhouse" - given how the subject is treated with such familiarity, the narrator assumes that we have made at least some acquaintance. with the subject, and because we know we haven't done it yet, we hope to know about it later - and the specific and "active" statement that "A guy I knew was really shot at.