Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 5B
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

In 10th grade English, as our final book 

of the year, my class cracked open Kurt 

Vonnegut’s 1969 novel “Slaughterhouse-

Five.” After a grueling year of classics 

like “Gulliver’s Travels,” “All Quiet on 

the Western Front” and “The Canterbury 

Tales,” I assumed that “Slaughterhouse-

Five” would be more of the same long-

winded stories that had populated our 

classes up to that point. The title reminded 

me of “Animal Farm” and filled me with 

expectations of complex allegories or 

tedious legends from a slaughterhouse. 

But as I read the first few chapters, I was 

surprised to find that “Slaughterhouse-

Five” was, well, good.

Now in college, I remember very few 

things from that first time I read Vonnegut’s 

novel. I remember something about aliens 

and a celebrity named Montana. I remember 

descriptions of the Dresden firebombing, 

which at the time I didn’t realize was a 

true historical event. Most importantly, I 

remember a description of an idea of time, one 

that may have come from the book itself or 

possibly my teacher attempting to explain this 

complex idea. The way to think of the timeline 

of someone’s life, according to Vonnegut’s 

ideas and my teacher’s careful explanation, 

is not as a straight line, as we tend to think, 

but similar to a book. When you hold a book in 

your hands, you hold the entire story, start to 

finish; every event in the book has already been 

written. While we are logically programmed 

to read the book from start to end, this is not 

the only way to experience its events. You can 

open the book to any page, any time in the 

story and you will be able to experience that 

event even if it is done out of order. This is the 

idea of time as a fourth dimension, beyond the 

three dimensions of space.

Vonnegut’s novel itself is utterly perplexing 

in many ways. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is 

partially first-person, narrated by a stand-

in for Vonnegut, and partially third-person, 

with a grand sense of omniscience. In the 

introduction, the narrator tells you exactly 

how the book will begin (“Listen: Billy Pilgrim 

has come unstuck in time.”) and exactly how 

it will end (“Poo-tee-weet?”). It’s a novel 

impossible to place into a single genre, filled 

with war and aliens and inherent human 

grief. It toes a line between historical fiction 

and science fiction that few authors have 

accomplished. But what is most perplexing is 

the way that “Slaughterhouse-Five” proposes 

the concept of time, a proposal that forever 

changed the way I thought about time.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in 

time,” the narrator tells us at the beginning of 

the first chapter. Billy’s journey throughout 

the novel is not linear, but spastic, bouncing 

between events in his life without rhyme or 

reason. These jumps tend to be triggered at 

particularly desperate or traumatic moments 

and often result in skipping full decades. This 

is connected to Billy’s experience as a soldier 

in Dresden, Germany, where he survives being 

a prisoner-of-war as well as the destructive 

firebombing of Dresden in 1945. After the war, 

Billy is hospitalized for PTSD; it’s around this 

time that he starts becoming unstuck, and the 

two things are clearly linked.

Even if being unstuck is the product of a 

psychiatric disorder, it’s still fascinating to 

consider. Despite his position in time, Billy 

also believes that he was abducted by the 

Tralfamadorians, an alien race that keeps him 

in a zoo. Importantly, the Tralfamadorians 

see in four dimensions; rather than the three 

dimensions of space that humans remain 

limited to understanding, the Tralfamadorians 

see our three dimensions plus time. According 

to the Narrator, this means that they view the 

idea of life and death differently: “When a 

Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is 

that the dead person is in bad condition in that 

particular moment, but that the same person 

is just fine in plenty of other moments.” This 

view of time means that one can view their life 

much more holistically; rather than focus on 

the loss of one moment, the Tralfamadorians 

find the life in previous moments. This ties to 

the common Tralfamadorian saying: “So it 

goes.” What has happened has happened, and 

what is going to happen will; so it goes.

Films, books and other media dealing 

with time travel often try to explore the idea 

of changing the past or the future. Plotlines 

are based around acting on questions like 

“What would I have done differently?” and 

“How do I prevent this from happening?” 

I’ve sometimes heard questions like “would 

you kill baby Hitler” thrown around, often 

jokingly and with little regard for the reality 

of the space-time continuum. In Vonnegut’s 

proposed version of time, however, these 

questions are irrelevant. Changing the past 

means that this version of the future would 

not exist, and if we’ve learned anything from 

Disney Channel’s “That’s So Raven,” it’s that 

trying to change the future usually results in 

making it happen.

I should clarify that I don’t believe this 

means we don’t have free will, nor that we 

should believe that actions don’t have real 

consequences. In the novel, Billy becomes 

fatalistic, believing that all events and actions 

come down to destiny. I don’t agree. Instead, 

it’s about trying to find a balance in between 

these ideas — finding a way to live in the 

moment without dwelling on a past or a future 

over which you have no control. It’s the idea of 

viewing time not just as a long line stretching 

somewhere into the future, but into something 

a bit more elastic in both directions.

Vonnegut’s concept of time

KARI ANDERSON

Daily Arts Writer

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

I tie “Interstellar” to the concept of time 

because of how rooted it is to a specific time in 

my life. I was 18 years old when I first watched 

the movie in my AP Literature and Composition 

class. I knew nothing of it other than that it 

starred Matthew McConaughey and came out 

in 2014 — my freshman year of high school. 

When we watched it, I was a month shy of 

graduating. I can’t tell you the run time, or 

at what point I truly felt myself reeled in, but 

I bawled my eyes out and forgot about the 

assignment all together. 

I am currently 21 years old and the same still 

stands: I will, without a doubt, bawl my eyes out 

to “Interstellar,” though it doesn’t feel the same 

way it did three years ago. I don’t know if this 

is a cliche or not, but the older I get, the more it 

dawns on me how stagnant 

artwork itself can be while 

its meaning is personal 

and ever-evolving. I think 

that’s because we are ever-

evolving — which brings me 

back to the movie in question. 

The running theme (in the 

most figurative sense) of 

the movie is time — running 

time, the physics of time and 

lost time. The movie takes 

place in a mid-21st century 

America plagued by blights 

and dust storms. Culture 

has regressed into a post-

truth society in which the 

younger generation is taught 

that events and ideas like 

the moon landing and space 

travel are hoaxes. The story 

is told through the lens of 

farmer Joseph Cooper, a 

former NASA pilot. After accidentally tracing 

geographic coordinates to a secret NASA 

facility, Cooper is recruited to pilot Endurance, 

a team of volunteers tasked with finding an 

alternative earth. Alongside this ambition are 

grave risks, namely the time variance between 

space travel that occurs far more rapidly than 

that of Earth’s. 

There’s a moment before Cooper’s ascent to 

space in which his daughter Murph protests his 

departure. Cooper brushes this off by joking 

that he might be back on Earth by the time him 

and Murph are the same age. This joke sours 

by the time Murph reaches his age and he is 

(spoiler) not back. After watching a stream of 

videos that accumulated from his son Donald, 

Cooper watches the 23 years he lost flash before 

his eyes. He gradually moves from embracing 

these moments to crying at the realization that 

his children have grown up without him. Every 

time, I cry as Hans Zimmer’s “Main Theme” for 

“Interstellar” plays in the background, knowing 

what is to come. I lose it once the music stops; 

looking up at the screen before him, Cooper 

finds an adult version of his daughter calling 

him a “bastard,” still visibly upset for his 

leaving. 

I think about this scene a lot because I’ve 

been in Murph’s place. I grew up not seeing 

one of my parents a lot, and this is an anger I 

still wrestle with as an adult. Can a parent truly 

care if they can’t be physically there for you? 

This was my question as a child. I wouldn’t 

say the reasoning for my situation parallels 

that of Murph’s, but it strikes me how much 

my reaction does. Murph’s last memory of her 

father was centered on the anger she felt toward 

him, and these feelings endured into adulthood. 

This is probably something I’m pulling from 

a psychology class I’ve taken at some point, 

but memories feel more tied to emotions than 

they are to actual events. The one thing I am 

certain of is that art means different things to 

different people because we’ve all had different 

experiences. I’m curious 

about how things would 

be different if I were a 

parent rather than a child 

at the time I first watched 

the film. 

I’ve never considered 

“Interstellar” 
profound 

for its plot. For one thing, 

it’s a bit too esoteric for 

my understanding. I don’t 

have much of a knack for 

physics. The plot holes 

are also glaring given the 

complexity of its synopsis. 

But I don’t think this 

demerits the heart and 

brilliance of this film; I 

praise the movie more 

so for its delivery — the 

way it elicits specific 

emotions and navigates 

relationships. 

I discovered this film around the time when 

I first caught on to the link between love and 

time. I spent all of high school in love with a 

friend who wasn’t right for me. Whether or not 

they felt the same way is something that matters 

less and less each day — another attribute of 

time. But when I think back to that person, I can 

only remember her the way I loved her. This is 

the power of love, and “Interstellar” captures 

it well. At the movie’s core is a love story 

between a parent and a child. Cooper spends 

days on an exhibition that ages him beyond his 

comprehension, but he does it out of love and 

emerges out of it still in love with his children. 

Murph is frustrated with her father throughout 

the duration of the film, but it’s also out of love 

and the way her 10-year-old self understood his 

departure. Despite the time and turbulence, 

the one constant of “Interstellar” is love and 

its extensions across different experiences. As 

my understanding of love changes more and 

more with age, I find that I can at least keep 

constant the way I felt in that moment of certain 

experience.

‘Interstellar’: Love and time

DIANA YASSIN
Daily Arts Writer

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

B-SIDE: BOOKS NOTEBOOK
B-SIDE: FILM NOTEBOOK

I discovered this 
film around the 
time when I first 
caught on to the 
link between love 
and time. I spent 
all of high school 

in love with a 

friend who wasn’t 

right for me. 

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