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.
Its always a possibility that Billy is entirely sane, but lives in such a universe where 4D aliens do exist. I do agree that the PTSD makes the book much more depressing, it becoming the ramblings of an insane man. It makes Billy even more pathetic and inept than he already was, because if you think about it it means that Billy thinks about himself like that in his memories. Not even future Billy Pilgrim has any good thoughts about himself, resorting to being unstuck in time and traveling to alien planets to get away from his problems.
ReplyDeleteReading your post, I immediately thought of Billy overhearing Eliot Rosewater telling a psychiatrist: "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living." It took me some time to figure out exactly what I thought he meant, but after finishing the book, I think it's a perfect description of Billy's passive cry for help. His coping mechanism for life in general (in relation to the traumatic bombing) is to construct a scenario where reconstructing scenarios is deemed futile.
ReplyDeleteI was bummed out by the end of the novel too. Even though Billy (and Vonnegut) went through terrible things, Billy sorta has this shield around him of these sorta "therapy" aliens that can help him get away from all the horrible stuff when he has to and go back to a time when things were better. Overall, it makes more sense to me that Billy is making all this up in his head but thinks it's all real. Being so stressed out, the human brain can imagine lots of things.
ReplyDeleteI do think that it's a plausible theory that Billy is just crazy. If you were to describe Billy Pilgrim to someone there's no doubt they would dismiss him as insane yet what if he is telling the truth? There's nothing that can prove whether or not the Tralfamadorians are real. I do think, however, that the mental health issue does serve to show the terrors or war, and after all the book is an anti-war novel.
ReplyDeleteI feel that Billy has to be sane, if only because the sci-fi world is just so complex. There is just so much detail to the world that the Tralfamadorians inhabit, from the zoo complex to their story for how the universe ends. And not just is it detailed but it is so consistent throughout the story, that it can't just be Billy's imagination.
ReplyDeleteI think the complexity of Billy's mental state plays to the idea that Vonnegut himself doesn't really know how to interpret his own experiences in war. He wants to use the novel to represent his ideas about war and how it has affected him, but because he is so confused about it, the novel itself is confusing. The novel could easily be a commentary about the struggles of veterans and their post-war mental states if Vonnegut wanted it to be read that way.
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