if they never really happened. Vonnegut's main character, Billy Pilgrim, has learned how to glaze over bad times like this. He has become, as he says, "unstuck in time," meaning his life is no longer in chronological order. It has become, to him, a series of moments. As he learned from the Tralfamadorians, he is able to time travel to any given moment in his life whenever he wants. Billy hasn't yet learned how to choose what moment he travels to, but he seems to be able to choose when he goes. He hops around from moment to moment as if he's flipping channels on a TV. For example, he starts out talking to his daughter, and then he gets in an argument with her and finds himself on Tralfamadore, where he is being displayed in a "zoo" for the locals to observe. Then he finds himself in bed with his wife on their honeymoon. When he gets up to look for the bathroom, he finds himself as a prisoner of war looking for the latrine. When he finds it, he sees that some of the other prisoners have become violently ill and are writhing in pain. So it goes. He is then reminded of his stay in a veteran's hospital and is transported there, where he has to listen to his roommate complain about him as if he's not there. Then he finds himself on the bank of a river being beaten in the snow, and hears the gunshots of two of his other travel mates being shot. So it goes. Next he is being led through an underground passage in Dresden, a city that will later be bombed, in which more people will die than in the bombing of Hiroshima. So it goes. The story is broken up like this throughout the novel. Every time Billy is in a bad situation he time travels. Therefore he never really deals with the present situation. He ignores his present situation instead. He's deciding to live in other moments in the past and future. He's living in denial. Through this example Vonnegut seems to be telling us that we don't need to put up with today's absurdi...
