The foreshadowing of events in Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five' is as much a subtle indication of things to come as it is an expository technique whereby the main Plot points of the story are blatantly spelled out as fact, leaving us to proceed through the novel and watch helplessly as each of these points is hit, in turn, as promised. Furthermore, foreshadowing is more than just a structural technique used by the narrator: it is also a distinctive aspect of Billy Pilgrim himself - it is part of his character, as his knowledge of future events influences his behavior throughout the story - and, on larger scale, foreshadowing is woven into the very fabric of the narrative, because this is a story where past, present and future intersect and all events that occur are known before they happen. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "I've finished my war book now," announces the narrator - perhaps Vonnegut himself, although we can't be sure - at the opening part of the novel, and already we can glimpse the end, because now we know that the story is told in flashback, and that the chronological sequence of events ends with the writing of the same novel we are reading. The narrator continues: The next one I write will be funny. This is a failure, and it had to be, because it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this: Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet? And as expected, we turn to the next page to see the actual novel which begins with the words: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has unstuck himself in time", and when we turn to the last page we see the novel which ends 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 forever into eternity, and with the narrator's observation that "Someone was playing with clocks... The second hand of my clock it moved once, and a year passed and then it twisted again" - we see that this is certainly a novel structured somewhat in the schizophrenic telegraphic style of the tales of the planet Tralfamadore. But what exactly should that mean? On the very first page of the novel, before the story even begins, we are told about the planet Tralfamadore as if we should already know its nature, but only when we are told that it is "where the flying saucers come from" are we then able to infer that it is a place with a civilization that has some consequence for the story - since we also infer that if the flying saucers are coming from Tralfamadore, they must also be headed somewhere else, presumably Earth; however, these inferences and impressions are what we can deduce from this abrupt introduction to Tralfamadore. Likewise, we see that the novel is subtitled "The Children's Crusade" - why we don't know. None of these things have any meaning to the story when they are first brought to our attention, but later, when they are explained - such as the planet on which the "fourth dimensional" aliens reside and how the title the narrator promises the his friend Mary which he will use respectively for his book - in retrospect, their significance becomes great. In addition to the method of foreshadowing already discussed, the omen of the novel now also takes a more subtle form of the enunciation of certain events, based on the assumption of knowledge already possessed rather than on the exposition of knowledge not yet achieved. In this case, instead of telling us openly what will happen in thenovel, the narrator talks about things that have already happened, thus foreshadowing their possible occurrence later in the story. Vonnegut's dual use of both major, precognitive foreshadowing and minor retrospective foreshadowing is not a common technique to use for foreshadowing in particular or for fiction in general - unless you're from Tralfamadore. "The most important thing I learned about Tralfamadore," writes Billy Pilgrim in a letter, "is that when a person dies he only apparently dies. He is still very much alive in the past... All the moments, past, present and future, they have always existed, they will always exist. [Tralfamadorians] can see how permanent moments are and can watch every moment that interests them." The style of the novel, therefore, reflects the perspectives of the Tralfamadorians, telling us about future events in one case and then assuming that we have already been told about them in another; sometimes stating specifically what will happen in the future - a more "active" foreshadowing technique - and sometimes assuming that the events that will happen in the future have already happened and that we know about them, and proceeding from there to talk about them as if they were familiar to us - a more "passive" foreshadowing technique. The effect of these two types of foreshadowing is a general feeling of ambivalence towards the future, largely devoid of any kind of emotional connection to events that have yet to occur. “His name was Howard W. Campbell, Jr. He would later hang himself while awaiting trial as a war criminal” the future is written, and it is inevitable, and so on. "Billy predicts his own death within the hour. He laughs about it, inviting the crowd to laugh with him. 'It's about time I died,' he says. 'Many years ago,' he said, 'a certain man promised to make me kill. ... Tonight he will keep his promise'" and he does, and Billy dies just as he said, and his death is expected, planned, premeditated, inevitable, and so on. We infer this not only from the words Billy uses, but from the narrator's change of tense: Billy says "It's about 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 went to sleep a senile widower and woke up on his wedding day" and "Billy sat in the waiting room. He wasn't yet a widower" - not again, but now we know that he will be, and, when the time comes for him to be widowed, we expect it to happen, and the event is once again imbued with a sense of inevitability, and therefore emptied of the emotional potency that spontaneity would otherwise would bring. “So it goes,” the narrator notes whenever someone or something dies. The death is not a significant event but is instead a mere formality, and this thought reflects not only the thoughts of the Tralfamadorians, but also those of the confused, bewildered, and desensitized American soldiers who, like the narrator, were - are - will be taken by surprise in the bombing of Dresden. Except one. Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be blown to smithereens and then burned in another thirty days or so. He also knew that most of the people watching him would soon die. goes." Yet, as Billy marches through the streets of Dresden, he is part of a "light opera" - or more than that, "Billy Pilgrim was the [light opera] star." Before - or after - during his time in the Tralfamadorian zoo, Billy asks the Tralfamadorians why they don't have a war on their planet. “Today we have [peace],” a Tralfamadorian tells him “On other days we have wars as horrible as you have ever seen or heard of Bed. There's nothing we can do about it" - again, emotional detachment from ainevitable future influences the behavior of this character and that of the narrator. attitude towards it (or towards it) - "so we just don't watch [the wars]. We ignore them. ... This is one thing Earthlings could learn to do: ignore the terrible moments and focus on the good ones." What we have in Billy Pilgrim, therefore, is a character who is an embodied prefiguration of someone who, with "memories of the future", is capable of looking with a smile at a city close to decimation and behaving like a "star" instead of grasping the opportunity to warn citizens of the danger that city on the inevitability of their fate. The actions of this character are then told to us by a third observer who had previously described himself as "a pillar of salt", alluding to the biblical story of Lot's wife and therefore painting himself with the same brush as those who cannot help but look back and reflect on the past. It is therefore a structure in which we have, first of all, the observation that prefiguration, in addition to being a novelistic technique on the part of the narrator, is also a character trait that is imprinted in the very essence of Billy Pilgrim, whose knowledge what will happen is an influence on the things he does and does not choose to do; and secondly, a comparison between those individuals who see the world as the Tralfamadorians see it and those who do not: the narrator, a figure of the present, always focuses his thoughts on the past, and is contrasted with Billy, a figure of the past, whose "memories of the future" allow him to concentrate his thoughts not on Dresden, even if he is there when it is about to be bombed, but on the good times, and light opera is a good time, and this ability to choosing which events to focus on allows him to smile and act like a star while knowing what this city has in store for him. With events foreshadowed in Billy Pilgrim's actual personal chronological timeline in turn influencing 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 in able to escape from 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, cannot, nor will he ever be able to escape the misery of Dresden and the misery of Dresden. past. The past, by necessity, defines the entire novel and provides it with a framework around which it is structured, and furthermore, allows for general foreshadowing: future events in such a novel are meaningless 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 "unstuck in time" is anything but realistic. The very first chapter, for example, outlines the novel as a whole, with a vague, "passive" reference to the "slaughterhouse" - given the way the subject is treated with such familiarity, the narrator assumes that we have made at least some acquaintance . with the topic, and since we know we haven't yet, we expect to learn about it later - and the specific, 'active' statement that "A boy I knew was really killed in Dresden for taking a teapot which was not his,” which does not bear fruit until the end of the novel: “Edgar Derby was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. tried and shot and throws that involves the appearance of a significant character: “Another guy I knew actually threatened to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.”.