Free-will and Billy in Slaughterhouse-five

In Slaughterhouse-five, free will is repeatedly questioned. Billy tells us, from his experience at Tralfamador, that everything is inevitable -- fate and destiny are already written and nobody can change that. In fact, when we are told of Billy a little bit in chapter two “Billy first came unstuck while World War II was in progress. Billy was a chaplain's assistant in the war. A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army. Billy was no exception. He was powerless to harm the enemy or to help his friends. In fact, he had no friends. He was a valet to a preacher, expected no promotions or medals, bore no arms, and had a meek faith in a loving Jesus which most soldiers found putrid.” Clearly Billy is not a good soldier, certainly not liked by his soldier-mates. He preaches-- to soldiers who don’t even believe in his religion. After learning that destiny is unchangeable, Billy does not care about anything, and spends the rest of “time” analysing minute things that a normal adult would simply not look at.

One way that we can understand this is by the idea of proofreading. What is proofreading, and why do we proofread? We reread our work, after completing it, to catch any errors that we didn’t see the first time, or that we thought were correct, but turns out they were incorrect. These are the terms in which we must understand Billy, he is “reanalysing” the world in a different manner, viewing things from a different point of view, because he has already achieved everything in life. Death or life are no longer a boundation to him, and as he moves through the time spectrum, he is oblivious to the obvious things, and is rather interested in just defining life and what it is to be human. This is why we learn history (literally the story of man; his-story), as to not commit the same mistakes as before.