Belief and Experience

“The time-traveler in the book went back to Bible times to find out one thing in
particular: Whether or not Jesus had really died on the cross, or whether he had been
taken down while still alive, whether he had really gone on living. The hero had a
stethoscope along.
Billy skipped to the end of the book, where the hero mingled with the people who were
taking Jesus down from the cross. The time-traveler was the first one up the ladder,
dressed in clothes of the period, and he leaned close to Jesus so people couldn't see him use the stethoscope, and he listened.
There wasn't a sound inside the emaciated chest cavity. The Son of God was as dead as
a doornail
So it goes.” (260).

In this passage, Billy has traveled to New York and finds himself reading a Kilgore Trout novel that he has discovered in an adult bookstore. Quite Humorously, Trout’s novel is about a “time-traveler” who journeys to Golgotha in in an effort to discover how mortal “The Son of God” really is. The empiricist time-traveler, who is twice referred to as “the hero” of the story, has wisely chosen to bring a “stethoscope” along to find out if Jesus is dead, one way or another. Interestingly, just as Billy interrupted the continuity of Trout’s narrative when he “skipped to the end of the book,” the “stethoscope,” serves as an ironic connection from the senses to experience, which disrupts the linear features of a divine being. By removing deity from the equation in “Slaughterhouse Five,” Vonnegut amplifies the absurdity of war while, simultaneously, highlighting the distinctions between belief and experiences. After all, there is no resurrection for Jesus here. In fact, there is an absence of sound indicating that no experience can be found to support his existence as myth in this passage. Jesus ends up just like everyone else, “dead as a doornail”.

How is the dismantling of Christian fantasy in this passage consistent with the non-linear structure of time throughout the novel? Could Vonnegut be suggesting that the worst things in life result from action derived from (A priori) beliefs rather than those founded in actual experience?