Philosophy for Billy Pilgrim

Today in class in light of the two panel presentations I've been thinking about the place that Billy seems to occupy philosophically, either as a nihilist or an existentialist. Now of course Billy doesn't necessarily fit either of these classifications, but I think that for someone who has the "insight" into free will that Billy has those two philosophies seem like they would be pretty close. And related to this I actually don't think that he fits neatly into either one of those roles, but more closely a combination of the two. Throughout most of the novel Billy has a total disregard for the things in his life that we generally consider to be important: his marriage, his business, and most importantly his life. On several occasions Billy has near-death experiences, and seems to be entirely apathetic to them. He sees no value in the continuation of his own life, what most people would characterize as nihilism. On the other hand, he doesn't exhibit the symptoms of despair that are often associated with the nihilistic realization of a lack of free-will or meaning. Instead he seems quite content and happy with the knowledge that he can't change anything. "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future"(77) and Billy's quite content with that knowledge.

So when I think about Billy's life philosophy earlier in his life I see him as having a mainly nihilistic viewpoint (certainly fatalistic), but exhibiting the happiness that you would generally associate with existentialism if you see them as competing viewpoints. That is, up until after his plane accident. For the first time in what we would conventionally think of Billy's life he feels that he has a true goal in his life: to inform people of the wonderful insights into the nature of time that the Trafalmadorians have helped him understand. "The cockles of Billy's heart, at any rate, were glowing coals. What made them so hot was Billy's belief that he was going to comfort so many people with the truth about time" (35). We see a definite switch from Billy as someone who has a lot of trouble finding enjoyment and purpose in his life to someone who has a definite mission: to spread the truth.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is a religious experience for Billy, but I would go so far as to say that his discovery of the Tralfalmadorians has been a spiritual experience of Billy. There are a lot of similarities to someone who claims to have recently undergone a spiritual transformation. Instead of finding Jesus Billy finds the Tralfalmadorians. He goes onto late night talk shows and starts to write his knowledge down in the form of open letters. And it all brings him a great deal of happiness. While I think it's impossible to say whether or not we should interpret Billy's interactions with the Tralfalmadorians as real events, they do give us interesting and useful insights into Bill as a character. 

Would the real Billy Pilgrim please stand up?

One of the biggest problems I have when discussing Slaughterhouse Five is that I'm never certain who exactly we're referring to when we use the name Billy Pilgrim. What I mean by this is that there seem to be many different planes that Billy exists on, at least as far as he exists in our novel. For instance there's the constant linear story of his actual wartime experience in Germany, and then there are the "jumps" where we exit WW2 and enter some different period of Billy's life. For instance as we've been fairly steadily working our way through Billy being captured by the Germans, "Bill traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a jade mechanical owl [...] Billy had fallen asleep while examining a female patient who was in a chair on the other side of the owl" (71). So the question now is do we read this as Billy experiencing his life linearly or not? I'm not sure I can provide an answer, because I think it's supposed to be unclear. Later it says, "Billy was starting to get worried about it, about his mind in general. He tried to remember how old he was, couldn't. He tried to remember what year it was. He couldn't remember that, either." (71). So it seems to me like there are two explanations for how we read Billy as a character. Either we read his experiences as a single individual who is losing touch with reality in the form of his mental state deteriorating, or we read him as literally traveling through time periodically to different sections of his life.

Now I know there's a certain amount of debate over whether or not it's a valid reading of the book to try and decide if Billy is mentally unstable or not. As far as I'm concerned we don't even need to touch the topic, because what really matters here is Billy's perception of how he functions in time. And I think we can all agree that's messed up. Regardless of the "reality" of the situation it can be universally agreed upon I think that Billy Pilgrim has an extremely disjointed sense of his own self. For instance, "He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next" (29). Now I'm not sure I could adequately support the idea that his wartime experiences are specifically responsible for his disjointing from time, but he does say, "that he first came unstuck in time in 1944, long before his trip to Tralfamadore" (38). I do think that it would be an entirely reasonable reading of the book to see this as in part a commentary by Vonnegut regarding what constant interaction with death can do to a soldier's perception of his life. It causes both us and Billy to wonder if the real Billy Pilgrim would please stand up.

Vonnegut's Science Fiction

One of the things that's been bothering me most about Slaughterhouse Five is that I don't really care for Vonnegut's science fiction writing for the most part. In addition to that I think I agree with the sentiment that science fiction as an art form isn't as taken as seriously as many other literary art forms. When you combine these two things it doesn't make it easy for me to understand the value of science fiction as it functions in the novel. To explain my feelings towards Vonnegut's particular skill as a science fiction writer here, I feel like he tries to tackle a subject which no human can possibly do correctly and fully: time and the 4th dimension. Specifically I don't think he does a particularly convincing job writing what the Trafalmadorian's would be like as creatures. In my opinion he makes them way too humanesque. Consider for instance the way they react to Billy, " Now the first question came---from the speaker on the television set: 'Are you happy here?'About as happy as I was on Earth,' said Billy Pilgrim"(147), which was true. For a species who don't believe in free will, it escapes me why they would believe that happiness or sadness mattered in any way. Perhaps, I just don't grasp the concept on an intellectual, but regardless of that I just don't think the quality of the science fiction in the novel is that good.

Wait, let me rephrase my previous statement. I don't think that Vonnegut's science fiction in Slaughterhouse Five is particularly "realistic". While I agree with all of the critiques stated above I think I might be missing the point of the science fiction in the novel if I tried to read it for how convincingly it portrays an alternate reality. As we've stated in class, simply because something isn't correct doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. So as I try to reconsider my stance on the science fiction aspect of the novel I have to ask myself, What if it's supposed to unrealistic? And I think I like that approach much more than my previous feelings. In addition to it being a bit shoddy on how it portrays time traveling, it's also just blatantly ridiculous fiction. Billy is abducted by little green aliens who look like toilet plungers. It doesn't get much farther from our perceptions of reality than that. And some people wonder to what extent this jeopardizes the seriousness of the novel novel. I'd say that in some ways it jeopardizes the seriousness completely. I don't think it's moral standpoint is one of those areas. In fact I would argue that the sheer ridiculousness of the fictional aspect of the novel actually adds to it's moral seriousness.

As we've agreed throughout our discussion of Slaughterhouse Five is that in our traditional context we generally hear about war as a glorified and hyper-masculine event. In reality, at least according to Kurt Vonnegut, wars are just babies killing babies. When reading a character such as Billy Pilgrim from a narrator like Vonnegut I'm totally struck by what we've been calling de-familiarization. I think that the science fiction scenes are absolutely supposed to seem unbelievable because Vonnegut doesn't want us to see any of the novel as reasonable. He wants to emphasize for us exactly how unreasonable and ridiculous war is, and that the type of person who isn't bothered by the killing of thousands of people, or being made a prisoner of war, is the same kind of person who's going to believe he was abducted by little green aliens shaped like toilet plungers.