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.