Time Shift

Time Shift in Kurt Vonnegut’s Novels

Time shift is usually found in many novels and stories, and it is a characteristic that is easy to spot out. It is usually when the author moves from one period to another. I will be relating this to Kurt Vonnegut and his different works. After reading some of his works, I can tell that Kurt Vonnegut uses time shift in a different way. What I realized was that he would predict things about the future and he’d move to a different time period while doing this prediction. In most of kurt’s novels, time is basically seen as subjective. In my opinion its subjective because we can only tell it’s there and happening from the different characters that are experiencing it. There is a lot of time travel and time shift In Kurts novel SlaughterHouse- Five, the time travel in this novel is used by the main character billy. He usually time travels, but the thing is when he does he doesn’t remember everything. He always finds his memories missing and incomplete, this can be shown as a side effect of time shift in novels. The time shift is used a entertainment, it attracts the reader into the novel and it has the reader going on and wanting to find out more. It’s kind of like a mystery, one tries to get to the end just to find out what happened and why it happened. Going back to the novel, many events that happen to billy are kind of like recurring events, they just happen to come back. It also shows us that the same events that took place in the past, took place again in the future in this novel. This novel shows time all together it’s all mixed up, it doesn’t specifically divide time into parts like the beginning or end, it’s basically when the present, future, and past are all existing at the same exact time. The main character billy is basically dragged through time and the different events he faces, it all happens so quickly without any warnings. From the first sentence we can tell that this whole novel had to do with time, the first sentence referred to billy as being “unstuck in time”. This shows that Kurt was attempting a type of time travel through the novel. The novel is surrounded by what is called Tralfamadorian time which is when the past, present, and future are all present together at once. The tralfamadorian time is something that billy is aware of through this novel, since billy is aware of what’s going on it kind of adds a little twist to the novel and it’s plot. Also billy experiences all the events at once, it’s a unknown feeling and isn’t really described that much during the novel. I vel. I believe that Kurt does a good job in using a way of time shift that I personally haven’t read about before, he brings new ideas about time shift into his novels. These new ideas are used to attract the reader, and it helps the reader move on and not get lost during the novel.