Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut explores the myth of free will in his novel, Timequake, where in Februrary 2001, there is a rift in time, sending everyone and everything back to February 1991. This look at time travel is very different from what we have experienced in the novels that we read for class in that when they go back in time in Timequake, they are not given the opportunity to change their history: what has already happened will happen again, making everyone relive terrible choices, accidents, and so on. This is Vonnegut at his best; he makes a claim in this novel that free will doesn't exist--that everything must happen as it has already happened; you can't change it now, so how could you think you could change it then?
When the rerun in time finally stops once time has caught up to Februrary 2001, Vonnegut makes the claim that "the hiccuping Universe, not humanity, was responsible for any and all fatalities." (110) When skimmed over, this sentence goes against what Vonnegut's message is: it appears to say that humans with free will cause fatalities. However, when read more carefully, it is clear that it is not FREE WILL but HUMANITY that causes fatalities and other atrocious things in the world--humanity that has no free will; humanity that can't help but do the things it does, as it is in the nature of humanity itself that acts in that way--"When free will kicked in, I simply kept on trying to get the soup off me before it could seep all the way through to my underwear. Trout said, quite correctly, that my actions had been reflexes, and not sufficiently creative to be considered acts of free will. 'If you'd been thinking,' [Trout] said, 'you would have unzipped your pants and dropped them around your ankles, since they were already soaked with soup.' "(112)

Vonnegut stresses that his novel, Timequake, is really called Timequake 2, because the first Timequake was finished in the timeperiod of the rerun. After the rerun had stopped and "free will" was restored, Vonnegut went back to his novel and added in personal quips and anecdotes. The book that is in stores, and the book that has always been in stores since it was published, is Timequake 2, harkening back to Vonnegut's idea that free will is a sham--that Timequake was never Timequake at all until it was revisited after the rerun. It was predestined that the book would be the anecdote version. Timequake 1 never existed. That sounds stupid, and I can't really explain what I mean in written word, but trust that it at least makes sense to me in my head. Maybe if anyone is interested enough I can explain it more clearly in person.