If the abduction to Tralfamadore is a psychosis / hallucination...

I think if you're looking at the movie's point of view, only the begining of the film when he's typing a letter and the end when he's explaining to his daughter and son in law about his experiences are reality. Everything else is a flashback. And the scene with his wife going apesh!t on the road was not from his viewpoint.

Then again, Billy got abducted by aliens before the plane crash, so it's a toss up

To cite the fictional universe of the great Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and to put script analysis aside, the Tralfamadorians are real beings (they are in other books). Considering that, it would be impossible for Billy to have hallucinated the happenings.

My interpretation is that the book isn't meant to be taken literally - I, as a reader, never imagined the book as anything other than fiction. In other words, I never interpreted the events as actual events, whether that be hallucinations/delusions or actual science fiction. I found more merit in understanding what being "unstuck" was all about; in my mind, a metaphor for the type of sense a man tries to make out of a world that is at times incredibly cruel and numbing. Someone who leads a fairly dull life, and who responds to intense tragedy in a fairly dull way on the outside, but leads a fantasy world on the inside. It's an incredibly convenient way to escape.

Plus, being "unstuck in time" is a really fun plot device, and I don't think the novel would have been nearly as enjoyable (and would have lost all the narrative flow) if it told the story chronologically.

In my mind Billy was clearly delusional. He went nuts after the crash and the loss of his loving wife. There's no effort needed to the task of explaining his time-travel and the trip to trafalmador. His mind is simply making it up as he goes along while writing at his desk.

For all we know he never actually went to the war, there's nothing of substance that says that it happened. What we see is his memories, and he could be subconsiously making everything up to give an dull life without purpose a meaning. The parts where he shows knowledge of the future are inserted by his mind and since noone survived the plane-crash but him for example, there's noone to say that he actually didn't pull the nasty prank on the plane right before takeoff.

How do I explain the diamond that the wife proudly explains the story of for example? Well, though his life may be dull and unimportant, but he seems to be substantially wealthy. The police where eager to keep a lid on the graveyard incident and Billy had the money for the damages in his wallet, he gave his wife a car, a huge white Cadillac, he chartered the plane that crashed (guilt-complex ahoy). So him just walking out and buying the diamond ring isn't all that unlikely. Later his mind fills in the blank spots and suddenly he was a war veteran that came out of the bombing of Dresden, an event he could have just heard his room-mate talk about while his mind was forming the delusion.

The future hasn't happened yet and his mind is free to make *beep* up without anyone having the proof that it will or will not happen.

I know that the delusion-theory is a dull way of explaining the events and could possibly explain anything, but think of things like the trafalmadorians. They know the universe in its entire length. They have followed Billy through his entire life. He has had two children and enjoys watching borderline porn at the local drive-in theatre. But for all their knowledge, they haven't seen a sexual intercourse? And they claim to be fourth-dimensional, explaining their invisibility and their inability to do something about it. But the sound of their voice travels without problem in three-dimensional space. And calling our world solely Three-dimensional is only half true. But to have life you must have passage of time, and therefore you must travel four-dimensionally. So for all intents and purposes we too are four-dimensional beings. We just lack the ability to control our way through that dimension. Which would mean that all the trafalmadorians would have to do is to sync up with his timeline to be able to both be visible and touchable.

It's inconsistencies like these that I wouldn't expect from a real-world experience. But rather from a man that has only heard about the fourth dimension and that it has something to do with time. Which Billy in this case is. And therefore also supports the delusion-theory.

Billy was never actually abducted and he really isn't time-tripping. The movie, like Vonnegut's book, attempts to show the effects of war-induced trauma. The time-tripping represents his disjointed mind and life. Tralfamadore, and especially his life there with Montana Wildhack, represents his attempt to find some sort of peace, if not answers, by imagining a race of beings who have all the answers and provide him with someone who loves and nurtures him.

I watched the movie for the first time last after having just finished reading the book. The movie reminded me of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in that you lose a great deal of the story in the conversion from book to film as you are forced to view the events from a more outside perspective - in this case without Vonnegut's narrative. Add to that the fact that the movie muddies the narrative waters by including events that didn't happen in the book (the going away scene at the airport for example) and it's a wonder how anyone is supposed to know what's really going on from the movie alone.

I absolutely loved the novel, but wasn't a big fan of the movie. I believe the novel hints that Billy Pilgrim imagined the events on Tralfamadore and is experiencing 99% of the rest of the story as flashbacks instead of time traveling. The movie pretty much flat out says everything should be taken as reality.

Billy Pilgrim is an innocent and somewhat simple minded individual. If anything, he came from a very innocent and simple environment. His experience in WW2 was devastating emotionally. Tie into that his experience surviving a plane crash, but losing his wife and father-in-law (and sustaining a major head injury) and his time and space travel can be seen as a means of coping through escapism.

In the novel, Billy becomes obsessed with the pulp sci-fi novels of Kilgore Trout after his post-war nervous breakdown. Among Trout's novels is one about a man who is abducted to an alien zoo where he is meant to mate with a movie starlet. Billy eventually meets Trout and becomes somewhat of a friend to him. On Billy's 13th wedding anniversary Billy swoons and Trout asks if Billy had just witnessed a "time window" - a situtation where someone randomly experiences an event from their past or future first hand. Trout brings this up apropo to nothing really and has to explain the concept to Billy.

Billy claims he's been time traveling since his time in the Belgian woods, but he doesn't actually mention it to anyone until after the plane crash where he sustained a major head injury and the loss of his wife. It is my belief that he sustained brain damage and reconstructed the events of his past to include time travel and aliens. The novel even hints that parts of his time in WW2 were imagined. There is a running theme of his wife's obsession with candy bars - namely Three Musketeer bars and his war companion Roland Weary's obsession with calling himself one of the three musketeers.

The movie really fouls up the above theory with two scenes: the airplane scene and Billy's assassination. In the novel, Billy mentions that he knew the plane was going to crash when he boarded it, but kept the thought to himself because he didn't want to seem foolish. In the movie, he hallucinates the skiiers on the tarmac, has a fit on the plane, and then watches everyone fall over in blurry slow motion. None of that happened in the novel and if we are to accept that event happened, then we have to accept that Billy knows about the future. The second scene that ruins the false memory theory is Billy's assassination. In the novel, he mentions to someone that he knows how he is going to die and then explains the speech and his assassination. He explains the scene to someone rather than having the reader/viewer experience it first hand as was the case with most of the other scenes. With these two scenes, the movie really pushes you in the direction of everything we see is real. The only saving grace is Billy's adoration of Montana Wildhack and him later meeting her (without her aging a day).

With fear of being that guy who says the book is better than the movie, I have to say the two supply two different perspectives and two different cases for what is real and what isn't. The novel is about innocence and war and how one person copes with both. The movie is about a bunch of tragic events that happen to a simple minded man -- and then some stuff in outer space. And don't even get me started on the clean and cheery POW Billy from the movie.

I watched the movie for the first time last after having just finished reading the book. The movie reminded me of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in that you lose a great deal of the story in the conversion from book to film as you are forced to view the events from a more outside perspective - in this case without Vonnegut's narrative. Add to that the fact that the movie muddies the narrative waters by including events that didn't happen in the book (the going away scene at the airport for example) and it's a wonder how anyone is supposed to know what's really going on from the movie alone.

I absolutely loved the novel, but wasn't a big fan of the movie. I believe the novel hints that Billy Pilgrim imagined the events on Tralfamadore and is experiencing 99% of the rest of the story as flashbacks instead of time traveling. The movie pretty much flat out says everything should be taken as reality.

Billy Pilgrim is an innocent and somewhat simple minded individual. If anything, he came from a very innocent and simple environment. His experience in WW2 was devastating emotionally. Tie into that his experience surviving a plane crash, but losing his wife and father-in-law (and sustaining a major head injury) and his time and space travel can be seen as a means of coping through escapism.

In the novel, Billy becomes obsessed with the pulp sci-fi novels of Kilgore Trout after his post-war nervous breakdown. Among Trout's novels is one about a man who is abducted to an alien zoo where he is meant to mate with a movie starlet. Billy eventually meets Trout and becomes somewhat of a friend to him. On Billy's 13th wedding anniversary Billy swoons and Trout asks if Billy had just witnessed a "time window" - a situtation where someone randomly experiences an event from their past or future first hand. Trout brings this up apropo to nothing really and has to explain the concept to Billy.

Billy claims he's been time traveling since his time in the Belgian woods, but he doesn't actually mention it to anyone until after the plane crash where he sustained a major head injury and the loss of his wife. It is my belief that he sustained brain damage and reconstructed the events of his past to include time travel and aliens. The novel even hints that parts of his time in WW2 were imagined. There is a running theme of his wife's obsession with candy bars - namely Three Musketeer bars and his war companion Roland Weary's obsession with calling himself one of the three musketeers.

The movie really fouls up the above theory with two scenes: the airplane scene and Billy's assassination. In the novel, Billy mentions that he knew the plane was going to crash when he boarded it, but kept the thought to himself because he didn't want to seem foolish. In the movie, he hallucinates the skiiers on the tarmac, has a fit on the plane, and then watches everyone fall over in blurry slow motion. None of that happened in the novel and if we are to accept that event happened, then we have to accept that Billy knows about the future. The second scene that ruins the false memory theory is Billy's assassination. In the novel, he mentions to someone that he knows how he is going to die and then explains the speech and his assassination. He explains the scene to someone rather than having the reader/viewer experience it first hand as was the case with most of the other scenes. With these two scenes, the movie really pushes you in the direction of everything we see is real. The only saving grace is Billy's adoration of Montana Wildhack and him later meeting her (without her aging a day).

With fear of being that guy who says the book is better than the movie, I have to say the two supply two different perspectives and two different cases for what is real and what isn't. The novel is about innocence and war and how one person copes with both. The movie is about a bunch of tragic events that happen to a simple minded man -- and then some stuff in outer space. And don't even get me started on the clean and cheery POW Billy from the movie.

Since it is all subject to interpretation, I always entertained the idea that Tralfamadore was the afterlife, since Billy and the dog were dead, and presumably Montana Wildhack may have been too, since she went "missing." In much the way that people supposedly "review" their lives after the fact, he was reviewing his. Just speculation.

I do like the scene where the light finally takes him away, suggesting visually it is either real (since the dog goes too) or it alludes to Billy finally surrendering to his psychosis. Either way it is a brilliant scene.