(you may say this is anticlimactic just stating what I'm going to talk about and/or build up to. But the whole of Slaughterhouse-Five is anticlimactic, so...)
Remember when Frozen came out (around Thanksgiving 2013, to give you an idea of how long ago that actually was)? Everyone loved that movie. I was at least thrilled to see a decent Disney musical. The plot was interesting and pulled me into the movie, and Frozen was officially fun to watch...that is, the first eight thousand times. The excitement of "Let It Go" and everything else really had died out by March of 2014. So it goes.
I feel the same fate has happened to Billy Pilgrim, in the sense where his life becomes a movie. Billy experiences his own life, or at least snippets of it, throughout the course of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
To begin, seeing oneself enter World War II again, or be "picked up" to go to an unknown planet, to re-experience one's life as an optometrist, and so on would be simply fascinating to me or to anyone, but this is where the Frozen analogy comes in: when Billy ends up reliving the scene where Roland Weary leads him on for miles and miles in Germany, the excitement, as evidently shown in the book, vanishes. This is perhaps the scene where Billy Pilgrim seems the least interested, alert, or excited about anything at all, and who can blame him? Having to go through Weary's many iterations of "saved your life again, you dumb bastard", or his childish tales of his father's torture device collection: "do you even know what a blood gutter is?" seems emotionally taxing in the sense that Billy becomes so apathetic he literally gives German snipers another chance at hitting him. His life becomes dull and boring, as well as (if I may say so) overplayed.
What adds to this are his experiences on Tralfamadore: Vonnegut mentions many times that the inhabitants of this planet 460 quadrillion miles away seem to have a very nonchalant attitude about planetary peace, death, and existential questions. I believe their indifference toward many things rubs off on Billy, and obviously while he already doesn't seem to care for many parts of his life. Billy really doesn't make much of his wife's death (compared to many people), or his own death for that matter. Tralfamadore does however seem to give him a passion that he previously lacked: he is now enthralled in science fiction, Kilgore Trout, and spreading the word that these Tralfamadorian creatures actually do exist. He is so passionate about this (well, at least he is the first time he goes through his life) that he secretly escapes from his hospital bed following a ski accident specifically to try and gain publicity for the planet and its flying saucers.
Billy seeing his own death raises a question for me, though, and one that remarkably no one yet has touched on: does Billy Pilgrim ever really die? His being unstuck in time allows him to see his death, and to have some idea of what happens afterward (violet light), but he must have bounced back to a different point after that or he would not be aware of this. Billy Pilgrim's body does eventually die, we know this, but there doesn't seem to be a point coming where his mind and his time-traveling abilities cease to exist. Billy may just go on forever, not being able to change anything in his life, reliving experience after experience again and again.
What a dreadfully boring life that would be.
To begin, seeing oneself enter World War II again, or be "picked up" to go to an unknown planet, to re-experience one's life as an optometrist, and so on would be simply fascinating to me or to anyone, but this is where the Frozen analogy comes in: when Billy ends up reliving the scene where Roland Weary leads him on for miles and miles in Germany, the excitement, as evidently shown in the book, vanishes. This is perhaps the scene where Billy Pilgrim seems the least interested, alert, or excited about anything at all, and who can blame him? Having to go through Weary's many iterations of "saved your life again, you dumb bastard", or his childish tales of his father's torture device collection: "do you even know what a blood gutter is?" seems emotionally taxing in the sense that Billy becomes so apathetic he literally gives German snipers another chance at hitting him. His life becomes dull and boring, as well as (if I may say so) overplayed.
What adds to this are his experiences on Tralfamadore: Vonnegut mentions many times that the inhabitants of this planet 460 quadrillion miles away seem to have a very nonchalant attitude about planetary peace, death, and existential questions. I believe their indifference toward many things rubs off on Billy, and obviously while he already doesn't seem to care for many parts of his life. Billy really doesn't make much of his wife's death (compared to many people), or his own death for that matter. Tralfamadore does however seem to give him a passion that he previously lacked: he is now enthralled in science fiction, Kilgore Trout, and spreading the word that these Tralfamadorian creatures actually do exist. He is so passionate about this (well, at least he is the first time he goes through his life) that he secretly escapes from his hospital bed following a ski accident specifically to try and gain publicity for the planet and its flying saucers.
Billy seeing his own death raises a question for me, though, and one that remarkably no one yet has touched on: does Billy Pilgrim ever really die? His being unstuck in time allows him to see his death, and to have some idea of what happens afterward (violet light), but he must have bounced back to a different point after that or he would not be aware of this. Billy Pilgrim's body does eventually die, we know this, but there doesn't seem to be a point coming where his mind and his time-traveling abilities cease to exist. Billy may just go on forever, not being able to change anything in his life, reliving experience after experience again and again.
What a dreadfully boring life that would be.
In direct response to your excellent clickbait title, I don't believe that Billy views his own future death. I recently made a blog post concerning this, but I view Billy as a tragic war veteran who experienced a brain-damaging plane crash and remembers his life in a very flawed way with time travel and alien abduction. If we treat the whole book as him, a middle-aged man who recently experienced a traumatic head injury, retelling his jumbled, discontinuous past experiences, then I think the only point where he "remembers" the future is when he views his own death. I pretty much just chalked up this event to be purely a figment of his own imagination. In reality he'll probably die in a much less dramatic way.
ReplyDeleteI don't really agree with Andy, so while it is possible that the entire novel is the delusional story of an Alzheimer's patient in a psych ward somewhere in upstate New York, I'm of the belief that Pilgrim is truly a Tralfamadorian in disguise; an android designed to learn about humans without personal knowledge of the alien origin of the being. That explains his being "unstuck in time", where perhaps instead he just has a weak 4D view (the irony of an optometrist with poorly developed sight). As such, I don't think that Billy ever really dies. You have to truly believe in the possibility of reincarnation for a being, as he just takes a break from life and tries his hand at being dead.
ReplyDeleteAt a completely literal and face value interpretation of your question, yes I do believe Billy dies at some point. Delving into more of the other details though, I think, like Andy, most of these visions and reliving of life are results of brain damage (these don't seem like uncommon effects of such injuries). If he were to be a trafalmadorian, the scenes with the zoo displaying as a human would make much less sense for the aliens.
ReplyDeleteAt a completely literal and face value interpretation of your question, yes I do believe Billy dies at some point. Delving into more of the other details though, I think, like Andy, most of these visions and reliving of life are results of brain damage (these don't seem like uncommon effects of such injuries). If he were to be a trafalmadorian, the scenes with the zoo displaying as a human would make much less sense for the aliens.
ReplyDeleteWell Billy's body does die at some moment, but according to the Tralfamadorians, his body is alive and well at many other moments. I do think that Billy has developed a sort of "don't care" attitude towards life. Realistically, can anyone blame him? Your analogy of a movie watched too many times seems accurate to me and I think he only gets moments of surprise when he's guessing where he'll end up next.
ReplyDeleteI really like your comparison. However, if there is a movie that we really love, it's usually still good no matter how many times we watch it! The problem here is that Billy doesn't enjoy life, and the traumatic experiences (even perhaps seeing his own death) have caused him to feel bored with life, and disinterested in it. This ties into Vonnegut's larger theme about the dehumanizing nature of war. (Although the analogy breaks down here I think, as if you were forced to watch the same movie over and over again forever, and you couldn't even control what scenes you watched at what time, I suppose it could get pretty crappy at a certain point.
ReplyDeleteWithin the fictional frame of the novel, if we believe all that "Billy says" about the true nature of time, he doesn't ever die--and neither do we. (Remember, the Tralfamadorian 4th-dimension stuff doesn't just apply to those in the know--we just aren't aware of the true nature of things with our feeble earthling brains.) He is always dead and always alive, because everything has always already happened, and he's "unstuck" in that timeline, bouncing around forward and back.
ReplyDeleteAside from the question of whether this would be an appealing way to live or a nightmare, it's easy to see the appeal of such a fiction, for a guy with deep qualms about the mass killing he witnessed in Dresden: no one ever really dies; when we see a corpse, it's just not doing well in that particular moment, etc. It's a way of removing the trauma from the event, much as Vonnegut removes the narrative thrust from his novel.