Billy, Mr. Wilson, and Time Hopping
(Disclaimer: I'm not claiming Mr. Wilson is a time-hopper. Just read to find out)
As we’ve constantly encountered Billy time-hopping in Slaughterhouse-Five, I’ve become more accustomed to the idea of time being unconfined to the terms “past”, “present”, and “future”. Instead, we have been introduced to capsules of time being chained to each other rather than blending together. This means that one is able to take a chunk of time as a link in a chain, instead of all of time being a flowing stream. In this way, we have seen Billy entering into different, sporadic moments of his life unconsciously.
Now, in psychology class, our class is infatuated with the concept of dreams: what they mean, why we have them, and how they work. We talk about them a lot as we discuss what kinds of dreams we have had (nightmares, good dreams, prophetic dreams) and why we dream what we dream. Not to bring names into this but it’s important to mention him because of the fact that he has lived through life more than us, Mr. Wilson mentioned that in the form of nightmares, he is often brought back to high-stress times in his life. His examples were when he when he was back waiting tables as a job and he isn’t able to sit everyone at tables, or being back in college and realizing during finals week that he had a class he didn’t know he was supposed to attend for the semester. I thought this was super interesting because his nightmares brought him back to his past, especially worst-case scenarios in the most stressful times of his life.
Hearing this, I thought about Billy and his time-hopping back to his experiences in the war. Before comparing, I do realize that there is a difference in which Billy actually lived through those experiences and was physically going from episode to episode of his life, while Mr. Wilson’s nightmares merely resembled what he didn’t want to happen and were not real life events that he could look back on and replay in his head. However, I found interesting similarities. For one, they are both subconscious - no one is able to control what you are about to dream; Billy is not able to choose which moment in time he is about to be placed in. Additionally, they both look back on extremely hard times - Mr. Wilson has nightmares about the most stressful moments in his past; Billy is often taken back to war time rather than a time during, for example, his childhood or right after the war. This makes me think that Billy’s time-hopping can be seen as a coping mechanism for his experience with the war (although Mr. Wilson does not necessarily have diagnosed severe PTSD from the events that he has nightmares about). What if Vonnegut actually wants us to see that his time-hopping and idealization of Tralfamadore as a figment caused by Billy’s awful experiences in Dresden, embellished by the irony in his inability to really deal with the situations he is in, thus causing his repeatedness of using the phrase “So it goes”? Maybe there is some sense in seeing the “sci-fi” element of this book as a manifestation of his PTSD from Dresden.
What do you guys think? Should Billy’s time hopping be seen as literal and merely a part of the “fiction” element of this “historical fiction” book, or as a psychological concept that Vonnegut embedded into this novel?
This is so interesting Grace- you should also read gloria's post because she makes a similar argument. If we make an assumption that Tralfamadore is just a figment of BIlly's imagination induced by his PTSD, then I think that especially relates to your example of dreaming. He is doing this subconsciously in his mind - which is basically what dreaming is. I also really liked your comparison of time as a chain made up by links as opposed to a river which continues to flow. I think that analogy really well expresses how time manifests for Billy and in Slaughterhouse-Five.
ReplyDeleteI really like this comparison between nightmares and the flashbacks that Billy was having. It complicates the question of whether Billy was actually time-hopping or just having some sort of psychological thing that caused him to believe he was time-traveling. The similarities to Mr. Wilson's case, as he clearly isn't time-traveling, makes me think that Billy was in fact just creating Tralfamadore as a way to remember and face the traumas of his past.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting idea! I definitely agree that there are a lot of similarities between Billy Pilgrim's time-hopping and the way that nightmares can seem to transport you back to another time in your life. It's also interesting because these similarities make it seem more likely that maybe this isn't actually literally what happened to Billy Pilgrim, but instead a way of describing his experiences with PTSD after the war or some other condition that might cause him to relive stressful and traumatic events in his life without actually, literally time-hopping.
ReplyDeleteI think Vonnegut is definitely trying to get a message across by mix-and-matching events from all different points in Billy's timeline, destroying the notion of time as a strict linear progression of cause and effect. I think part of it might be hearkening back to the age-old idea of history repeating itself (or at least, rhyming.) By placing events in 1944 in the middle of his post-war life, it gives the impression that the war hasn't really ended for Billy himself but also potentially for the world at large. Not just that the impacts of the war still remain, but also that such a war has happened before and will happen again - a sentiment that Vonnegut would likely want to push, having written this book in the midst of Vietnam.
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