Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.

Book Title: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Pages: 66-118 since last week; 118 since semester

Billy travels back and forth in time from defining moments of his career of optometry to when he is captured in the war by Germans to when he is abducted by aliens. When Billy is captured by these Tralfamadorian aliens, he asks, "why me?", and the aliens respond by saying that there is no why, because the moment simply is, and that everyone is trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.

Tralfmadorians accept the fact that things just happen they way they do just because, and that "only on Earth is there any talk of free will." This encounter with the aliens reminds me of nothing less than the myth of Sisyphus and our class discussions about fate. The Tralfamadorians seem to think the complete opposite of what Camus thought about creating your own fate, that you cannot change time. I think Vonnegut's manipulation of time has something to do with the way he interprets fate, I'm just not quite sure about it all yet.