Like bugs trapped in amber, their cocoons preserved them against the elements, against time.
Curt scrabbled on his hands and knees for cover under a table, and Harlan and Pete had mashed themselves against a wall like bugs trapped to a screen.
In Chapter 4, for example, the Tralfamadorians use the metaphor of bugs trapped in amber to describe human beings caught in time.
Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
Something within him pressed outward against his skin like bugs trapped in a flexible bag.
He saw himself in the amber mirror, and for the first time he was not a bug trapped in their molten gold.
The persistent image of a bug trapped in amber is Vonnegut's clearest expression of this idea.
Kaplan, though typically a pragmatist, started carrying a bug trapped in amber in his pocket for luck.
He moved, he felt, as if in slow motion, a bug trapped in hardening amber.