Time-Travel Twins (Fraternal)

NOTE: This is inspired from Jonah Koslofsky's comparison of Slaughterhouse-Five to a Captain America comic, in the vein of being "unstuck in time". In this case, I'll be tackling the time-travel similarities and differences between Vonnegut's postmodern novel and Kindred.

In a lot of ways, it seems that Kindred and Slaughterhouse-Five are near opposites on the postmodernist spectrum. Both attempt to depict human suffering in extremely different ways; Vonnegut separates us so far from Dresden with irony and ridiculous tangents that we realize how hard it is to accept, while Butler gives readers a hearty wake-up-slap in a brutally unflinching display of slave life. And yet, Butler was not present for any era of American slavery, while Vonnegut was absolutely present for the firebombing, but cannot bring himself to write too honest an account. Finally, for consecutive books in the class to exhibit time travel subplots, they deal with the plot device in remarkably different ways.

One way that the two time travelers compare and contrast is the actual "traveling pattern" that they both have. As we are immediately told in the main plot of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. His whole life is a non-linear hodgepodge of events that he is constantly aware of (he is certain of his own death and of those around him, so it goes) and knows that he CANNOT change any of them. The time-travel is never dramatized; being cognizant of every minute detail in his life renders the temporal changes meaningless to him. Kindred's Dana deals with a similar non-voluntary transportation, but the setup is completely reversed. Dana will only travel to a specific period in the 19th century that she wasn't alive in, during which her ancestors are coming of age. She lives in constant fear of her personal future as well as her whole world's, as she is uncertain of whether or not her actions in this period will alter the course of history before her own time. Whereas Billy is certain of all aspects of his temporal life, Dana's position makes her unsure of her past, present and future. This tendency seems to reflect each author's experience with their writing material; Vonnegut's character is just as certain about Dresden as himself, while Butler, just like Dana, only knows what she has researched in the present day.

Next, partially due to Kindred's more modernist narrative structure, time-travel is dramatized in slightly different methods between the two stories. Vonnegut uses it to dance around his actual anti-war sentiments and real-life experiences, because his own emotional attachment is a bit too strong to describe up front. There seems to be no conflict due to the unbounded time-travel mechanics, but the emotional impact of Slaughterhouse-Five is eventually realized by the reader; Dresden sucked so bad that Vonnegut can't even do it justice, and he has (as has Billy) constructed this alternate reality with aliens to distract himself from it. Kindred's emotional impact however is reliant on in-your-face slave era brutality, which is undoubtedly effective in showing the horrors of the time.

So yeah, time-travel has some similar narrative impact on each books, but it's the journey, not the destination, that really differs in these cases. Man, who doesn't love good time travel books?

Billy's Bunkness Bums Me Out

Even in the internal world of Slaughterhouse-Five, I'm pretty sure the science fiction sections are all in Billy Pilgrim's traumatized, banged up mind. This is my personal opinion - I actually have no clue what other History as Fictioners have made of these sections. Either way, I believe that the overwhelming evidence of Billy's madness strengthens the mental and emotional impact of the Dresden firebombing. Here's why.

Let's start off with some nice clues as to how Billy formed the Tralfamadore narrative in his head, and how it so starkly differs from reality. We've talked about a few of these in class. The first aspect that led me to believe Billy to be bunk was his noted fascination with Kilgore Trout. While in the hospital with Eliot Rosewater, the narration mentions that both "found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war", and "were trying to reinvent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help" (101). In conjunction with specific plot summaries of Trouts work provided later in the novel, which have to do with fourth-dimensional creatures, human zoos, and extra-terrestrials, one can see very clearly how Billy has filled in his terrible memories with a new fantasy. Other details involving Tralfamadore and his real-life seem to deliberately link up with this theory. Right after making love on Tralfamadore to Montana Wildhack (a random porn star he sees in an adult shop later in the novel), he appears back in his bed, having "had a wet dream about Montana Wildhack" (134). Along with other associations he makes, like the prayer on Wildhacks locket being present in his optometry office, and his visible signals of some mental trauma (kicking and whimpering during nightmares in his boxcar, to the annoyance of his fellow soldiers), the argument seems heftily supported. But why is that so important? Why do I, Ethan Simmons, feel especially bummed out at the end of this novel?

By making an extreme, meticulously constructed alternate reality for Billy, Vonnegut shows how horribly inconsolable the terrors of war can be, so much that Pilgrim has to go to another planet to even cope with his experiences. When you think about it, Tralfamadorian ideology is built to aid Billy's psychological suffering; passing off the tremendous death he's seen by "focusing on the good stuff." So it goes, right?

I'll admit, this vision of the novel makes it quite a bit more depressing, but I doubt I'm the only one that holds these notions. I'm interested to hear how you guys have interpreted the science fiction aspect. It's been an active point of discussion for the past week.