Billy Pilgrim's time travel in Slaughterhouse-Five is very confusing and oddly situated inside of the novel. I have many questions regarding Billy's time travel and how it relates to his experiences and trains of thought throughout the novel.
It is clear that Billy knows that Dresden is about to be bombed before it is even speculated, so we know that Billy has the memories from his past when he is experiencing the present. We know that he had not yet experienced the bombing in the days leading up to it because that happens later in the novel, so he couldn't have been going off of that, assuming the book is told in chronological order.
It seems like at some points, Vonnegut uses time travel to avoid talking about the war. When he's about to get to an interesting possibly climatical point in the war, he quickly transfers to his life as an optometrist or his experiences on Trafalmadore. If Vonnegut had focused this novel entirely on the war and included no other details, it would've been an awfully short novel. He seems to want to avoid the war as much as possible, but still wants it to be a war novel. Was this just extreme PTSD? 20 years after? So much so that he couldn't even write a majority of his "war novel" about the war?
Another thing to ponder is Vonnegut's use of Trafalmadore in the novel. The fact that Billy time travels and gets abducted by aliens is a big deal. Could he possibly be doing this to draw us away from the war aspect of the novel?
In the end, I think Vonnegut started this book intending to tell of his experiences in WWII through a character named Billy Pilgrim, but soon Billy needed a backstory and why not include time travel and aliens? Then he'd have to talk about the war less. Billy's relatively unexciting job as an optometrist is interesting because if Vonnegut had been following his previous trend of injecting very exciting odd aspects to Billy's life, you'd think he'd have a more interesting job. His job as an optometrist could also be a metaphor for how hard it was to write this book and how hard it was to see the war the way he did.
I wouldn't say there is anything accidental (referring to your "why not include time travel and aliens") about Billy's backstory. I agree that it seems to be a way to avoid talking directly about the war...but the way it does it adds to the actual descriptions of the war. Whether it's hearing what the Tralfamadors have to say about war, or seeing Billy's reaction to the barber shop quartet--it distances us from the war, but it also lets us see Billy in a broader context, reminding us of his humanity.
ReplyDeleteAlso I like your connection to optometry. So much of this book really is about the way we *see* war. I hadn't thought of that connection to his occupation.
You do make a reasonable argument that Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian sections of the novel to stall and not describe the actual bombing until the near end of the book, but I do not hold the same opinion as to why he included what he did. I think the stretched out inclusion of Tralfamadorians and their world view is actually quite intentional, and there are several plausible interpretations as to what Vonnegut's reasoning for writing about them is. Vonnegut using the technique of bringing in an alien planet into the novel goes along with his whole anti-war approach to writing. Both in the time it actually takes from the description of the bombing itself (as you mentioned) and the views discussed about Earth from the point of view of Tralfamadorians, Vonnegut successfully deviates away from the message that war should be recognized as good.
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