The Many Forms of Time Travel

Too many sources to count deal with the abstract idea of time-travel, that, without human knowledge of exactly how this is possible, we can envision jumping to periods of time outside of our own. But they all have different ways of going about it, and different implications for the future. To begin with, movies, such as Back to the Future, often have time travel existing with a caution: any actions done in the past directly influence the future. Kindred seems to follow this model pretty closely, and we get the sense from both of these examples that Marty McFly and Dana will both cease to exist in the future if they don't perform their necessary tasks. This is one way to go about explaining time-travel.

Kurt Vonnegut has a different way of writing about this concept. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim does not merely see his past/future self, instead he is his past/future self. He can't change his actions or his past/future; however, Billy is able to adopt a bored attitude that definitely influences what his compatriots in the train car say to him. So Billy has some fluctuation between observer and participant in his time-travel experience. But the important (relevant) idea is he is his past self, not merely watching.

Every book about time-travel seems to have a different interpretation and way of describing this phenomenon. My personal favorite is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the one book in the series with no Voldemort involvements!). In the third installment of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling uses magic to justify having time-travel in her book. The element I like most about the nature of her time travel is that Harry does see himself hours earlier but everything he does completes his memory of what had happened before and answers his previous questions (read chapters 16-21 if you're interested, particularly 21). Basically, there is no way Harry can destroy a space-time continuum if every action of his simply plays into the past he remembers. In addition, Harry and Hermione go back three hours in time but the gist of it is, they're not always three hours ahead of their past selves, rather, they have three hours before their past selves will be going back in time. Thus, Harry and Hermione must get back to where they were location-wise when they traveled in time to ensure that their story goes on cleanly from other witnesses' perspectives.

Kindred, though, has an interesting storyline in that Dana went back in time not on her own will, but rather as a summoning by a character of that time. Dana does not travel back accidentally like Marty McFly or on purpose like Harry Potter but rather by a force outside of her world in 1976. The plot of Kindred sort of follows along with the standard Back to the Future sets (I actually don't know which was made first, the movie or the book, so I'll just base it on a Back to the Future standard) where Dana has to do these tasks or she will not exist one hundred and fifty years later. Marty McFly, of course, has to keep his real location in time secret, but Dana uses her present and the progress the nation had made from 1819 or so to 1976 for useful means. One, it immensely helps her to at least try and mold Rufus into a respectable, tolerant adult (which still isn't really enough) by coaxing him to adopt some of the polite measures of her time (as seen in "The Fire"). Secondly, being open about her advanced position and ability to save Rufus from his various situations helps Dana get some recognition and, dare I say it, respect from him which she needs in order to save her lineage and free her life from constant callbacks to the nineteenth century.

Does Billy Pilgrim Die?

The last thing I really want to do is put another blogpost out there about how dull Billy is. I have put the above title for the purpose of drawing my audience into reading this, but (spoiler) the following post mostly concerns the effects of time travel and Tralfamadore on Billy Pilgrim. And then, of course, the question the post is titled after. But mostly the effects.
(you may say this is anticlimactic just stating what I'm going to talk about and/or build up to. But the whole of Slaughterhouse-Five is anticlimactic, so...)
Remember when Frozen came out (around Thanksgiving 2013, to give you an idea of how long ago that actually was)? Everyone loved that movie. I was at least thrilled to see a decent Disney musical. The plot was interesting and pulled me into the movie, and Frozen was officially fun to watch...that  is, the first eight thousand times. The excitement of "Let It Go" and everything else really had died out by March of 2014. So it goes.

I feel the same fate has happened to Billy Pilgrim, in the sense where his life becomes a movie. Billy experiences his own life, or at least snippets of it, throughout the course of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. 
To begin, seeing oneself enter World War II again, or be "picked up" to go to an unknown planet, to re-experience one's life as an optometrist, and so on would be simply fascinating to me or to anyone, but this is where the Frozen analogy comes in: when Billy ends up reliving the scene where Roland Weary leads him on for miles and miles in Germany, the excitement, as evidently shown in the book, vanishes. This is perhaps the scene where Billy Pilgrim seems the least interested, alert, or excited about anything at all, and who can blame him? Having to go through Weary's many iterations of "saved your life again, you dumb bastard", or his childish tales of his father's torture device collection: "do you even know what a blood gutter is?" seems emotionally taxing in the sense that Billy becomes so apathetic he literally gives German snipers another chance at hitting him. His life becomes dull and boring, as well as (if I may say so) overplayed.
What adds to this are his experiences on Tralfamadore: Vonnegut mentions many times that the inhabitants of this planet 460 quadrillion miles away seem to have a very nonchalant attitude about planetary peace, death, and existential questions. I believe their indifference toward many things rubs off on Billy, and obviously while he already doesn't seem to care for many parts of his life. Billy really doesn't make much of his wife's death (compared to many people), or his own death for that matter. Tralfamadore does however seem to give him a passion that he previously lacked: he is now enthralled in science fiction, Kilgore Trout, and spreading the word that these Tralfamadorian creatures actually do exist. He is so passionate about this (well, at least he is the first time he goes through his life) that he secretly escapes from his hospital bed following a ski accident specifically to try and gain publicity for the planet and its flying saucers.
Billy seeing his own death raises a question for me, though, and one that remarkably no one yet has touched on: does Billy Pilgrim ever really die? His being unstuck in time allows him to see his death, and to have some idea of what happens afterward (violet light), but he must have bounced back to a different point after that or he would not be aware of this. Billy Pilgrim's body does eventually die, we know this, but there doesn't seem to be a point coming where his mind and his time-traveling abilities cease to exist. Billy may just go on forever, not being able to change anything in his life, reliving experience after experience again and again.
What a dreadfully boring life that would be.