stion. Guilt is a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime wrong ;a feeling of culpability. For example if one steals a hundred dollars, one would feel remorse over that action and wish one had not done it. Under the Tralfamadorian outlook Billy Pilgrim does not have to feel remorse for being saved because that is how it was and always will happen. He does not have to feel guilt or remorse because there is no reason to. There is nothing that can be done about war and death, "they are as easy to stop as glaciers." (Vonnegut 3) The death of all those innocent people could not be stopped, it was predetermined by some unknown force just as the destruction of the Universe, by a Tralfamadorian testing a new fuel, is also predetermined and unstoppable. Vonnegut uses irony by having Billy Pilgrim an Optometrist, whose job it is to help others see the world more clearly with greater acuity and sensitivity. Billy believes it his job to "prescribe corrective lenses for Earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy believed, because they could not see as well as his little green friends on Tralfamdore." (Vonnegut 25) This is in essence what the Tralfamadorians teach him that the Human view of time is erroneous (Tanner 198). The Tralfamdorians give Billy an analogy of how humans perceive time: Human vision is something so narrow and restricted...to convey to themselves what it must be like they have to imagine a creature with a metal sphere around his head who looks down a long, thin pipe seeing only a tiny speck at the end. He cannot turn his head around and he is strapped to a flatcar on rails which goes in one direction (Vonnegut). Billy by accepting the Tralfamadorian view of the world frees himself from the metal sphere and from his guilt. Much of Billy's guilt rested on his view of time and nature. Before he was introduced to the Tralfamadorian viewpoint he believed in crusading against war and the d...
