I was going to bring this up in our panel presentation today, but we ran out of time. What I was going to ask was, is PTSD to simple of a diagnosis to slap on Billy to explain his actions? Is it unfair to give him the PTSD diagnosis? Since we did not get to it in class, I will answer it with my opinion now.
To put it simply, I do think PTSD is not a sufficient explanation for Billy's actions and thoughts. PTSD is a concrete disorder with concrete symptoms. Although Billy may have PTSD, that is not saying much. That doesn't really matter. All that says is that he has flashbacks from the war and it haunts his present occasionally. What really matters is the actual depth and substance to his flashbacks.
If we diagnose Billy with PTSD, it is assumed that his time travel and Trafalmadorian experiences are not in fact real but just a figment of his imagination as part of his PTSD. Even if they aren't real, if we label Billy with PTSD, it is easy to overlook them as "symptoms" instead of studying what happens in his experiences, which could tell us more about Billy than simply saying "Oh, he just has PTSD".
As Arch put to a vote today during class, are Billy's time traveling and Trafalmadorian experiences real (in context of the plot of the novel) or fictional, maybe a coping mechanism for Billy. I believe that they are real and that Billy really does go through those things. This may partly be because it creates a better story, but I still believe it. I would believe that Vonnegut may have included them in the novel as a coping mechanism for him personally, but I think they were intended to actually have happened to Billy. I guess I can't really explain why I want them to be real. On Trafalmadore, Billy experiences a way of life that adopts the notion that each moment in time is a moment in itself and we have no free will and what happens happens. He thus adopts the phrase "So it goes". I like to think that Billy's experiences with this alien society quite literally help him cope with the pains that come with war. That if he did in fact have PTSD, it is not expressed by his "made-up" experiences on Trafalmadore, but Trafalmadore actually teaches him to cope with his PTSD better.
Similarly, If Billy does indeed have PTSD, I like to think that the constant stress of time travel and not ever being relieved from war or having a substantial period of time to recover is the cause of his PTSD, not a symptom.
I certainly think it can be useful to point out how Billy's strange experiences with time and space travel might be understood as the result of trauma from the war--that the novel isn't necessarily presenting "straight" the idea that this guy "really" has been to a distant planet where the "little green men" look like toilet plungers with hands for heads. And the dislocated narrative recalls the phenomenon of an acute, repressed memory of traumatic experience recurring and "bringing the victim back" to the original site of trauma.
ReplyDeleteBut I agree that a straightforward "diagnosis" may not be accurate and may oversimplify the picture. In a real sense, the novel becomes *less* interesting and mysterious if we put Billy into a neat little box labeled "PTSD." But it does make sense to think about how this experience "disrupts" the meaningful narrative of his life, and this inability to reconcile it with the bigger picture leads to a unique narrative structure--he's literally not able to shape his life into a simple, straightforward narrative.