In Response to Brown's Slaughterhouse Five Analysis [EXTRA]

Here is what I find most interesting about this essay.

First off, since first being hit by Vonnegut’s Tralfamadore curveball, I, like Billy’s patronizing daughter Barbara, have been struggling to make sense of it all. My first impression was that Billy was suffereing from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); a double-effect of he surviving the plane crash after everyone else, including his wife, perished and also his wartime experience in Dresden years before. I was surprised at how willing to believe Billy and his extraterrestrial experience my classmates seemed to be. Briefly, it seemed important to me to find out whether or not Billy’s Tralfamadore experience ‘really happened’ or not. This quest was soon replaced by the somewhat apathetic thought that it really does not matter at all whether or not Billy Pilgrim was captured by aliens, all that is important is the way in which it affects him. Kevin Brown seems to agree somewhat with my philosophy, and explains the phenomena in the following way.

Billy does not become vocal about his Tralfamadore experience until after the war. It is also after the war that Billy admits himself to a psychiatric ward. Here, he meets the colorful Eliiot Rosewater. The two seem divinely appointed to have hospital beds next to each other due to the fact that they each share similar life views. Specifically, nihilistic views. It is Rosewater that introduces science fiction to Billy. I read through Billy and Rosewater’s encounter without thinking too much about the significance of the scenes. Things began to become more clear, however, after reading Brown’s critical essay. After returning from the warfront, Billy seems to have trouble making grasping the things that he witnessed and experienced. He sporadically weeps, an act which I have found to be the most heart-wrenching in all of the novel thus far. He has trouble sleeping at night but falls asleep during the day while he is at work. An endless drone of “why me? Why me why me?” seems to circulate through his head. Rosewater introduces Billy to the idea that “new lies” must now be created, because otherwise, the hardened wartime generation will no longer desire to go on living. According to Brown, Billy then “tries to develop new lies to live his life; but in his attempt, he creates the Tralfamadorians and their philosophy. (51)” Suddenly I begin to make correlations between the science fiction plots that Billy has read and his own story of his experience with the Tralfamadorians. Billy’s stories and the science fiction stories he reads all seem to blur together. Billy has created the Tralfamadorians as a coping mechanism to deal with his PTSD. Brown also points out that the mindset and philosophy of the Tralfamadorians often mimes that of the Germans. Neither party seem too put-off by death, no matter how gruesome. Billy creates a mindset in the tralfamadorians that is a bit more romantic than that of the way the Germans are gruesomely portrayed. This too seems symbolic, as if Billy is somehow trying to grant parodnto the Germans, as well as to his own country and Great Britain, who were responsible for bombing Dresden. Under the mindset of the Tralfamadorians, the city was always meant to be destroyed, and it always will be destroyed. Billy was always meant to live. That is just the way things are; so it goes. Billy has adopted the mindset of his ”made-up,” otherworldly captors, and has thus developed a “peace that comes through understanding.” It all seems very complex and intricate, and yet somehow, it works for Billy.

It seems to me that Billy travels in time to his stay in Tralfamadore in a flashback-type manner while he is at war. It could be that I am confusing his flashbacks to his old life in The States to his time in outer-space. If I am not confusing these times however, I am still left with one question, a question which I am not sure I know how to answer just yet.

If Billy created the story of the Tralfamadorians, a story which he obviously believes to be true and thus IS true for him, AFTER the war when he was in the psych ward, then why is it that he has “flashbacks” to his times in Tralfamadore DURING the war?

So much confusion.