How to Cope Like Billy Pilgrim

In Slaughterhouse Five I was shocked to read that some of the Kilgore Trout books had similar plots to what Billy has been describing about his experiences on Tralfamadore. Throughout the whole reading and our discussions in class I had taken up front that Kurt Vonnegut was telling us that the alien abduction and Billy’s experiences on Tralfamadore were real within the context of the novel. At first it seemed clearly NOT real that there would be aliens in book but hearing that Billy Pilgrim was unstuck in time, and hearing the Tralfamadorian interpretation of time, the story started to add up and I began to believe it was real (in the story, probably not real life).

            Once we were told about the book plots that followed the same storyline as Billy’s time in outer space, I felt kind of silly for just accepting Tralfamadore plotline as truth (honestly I wanted it to be real). But it was a truth of some sort, it may not have been physically happening but for Billy Pilgrim Tralfamadore was his truth and his way of seeing the world.

In class we discussed a bit how Tralfamadore may have been Billy’s way of coping with his traumatizing time at war. This makes so much sense because I can totally see how the Tralfamadorian way of thinking would be comforting to any person, especially someone with PTSD. The Tralfamadorians say that they just look away from war because there is nothing that can be done to stop it, or that everything that will happen has already happened and has already been decided. This kind of thinking explains away the randomness of death in war, how the most experienced soldiers die while people like Billy live. It can give a sort of peace in knowing that anything bad that will happen isn’t your fault, it is just the way that things will happen in the universe.


Do you guys think that Billy is using Tralfamadore to cope with the horrors of war? And I’m curious, do you think that knowing how the universe plays out and that you can’t change it would be comforting or scary?

Comments

  1. Lili BanihashemMarch 16, 2018 at 11:53 PM

    Honestly I have no idea. My views on it have definitely fluctuated like yours - at first I thought it was ridiculous, then I accepted it and took it for granted, and now that you mention it, I can see Tralfamadore being merely a coping mechanism for Billy. Like you said it seems like a pretty darn good coping mechanism. In many ways I think it allows Billy to deny the finality of events like deaths - someone dying is of little importance because he'll see them again in another period of his life. Tralfamadore is also a place for him to escape to. So yeah, I definitely see your point, but at this point I think I've just accepted the whole Tralfamadore is real thing.

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  2. captainumaricaMarch 17, 2018 at 11:56 AM

    I'm gonna be honest, it kinda pisses me off that Vonnegut included that. I feel like the novel could be a lot more powerful if he hadn't included these little cop-outs and offer the classic lane of "It was all a dream." At the risk of sounding like a pretentious douche, adding Trout's books that closely parallel the Tralfamadorean encounters isn't postmodern. It doesn't subvert the nature of the reality, it merely questions the reliability of the narrator's perspective, suggesting that there is still some objective reality to get at. But that weakens Vonnegut's anti-war narrative, which is that there is no singular truth to the chaotic and messy nature of war.

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    Replies
    1. Nathalie SteinMarch 17, 2018 at 5:39 PM

      Honestly, I disagree. I don't really think including the Kilgore Trout stuff was a Shymalan-esque 'it was all a dream' twist (the kind that I'll agree is aggravating) was a bad choice. Choosing to write the Tralfamadorian narrative was clearly a coping mechanism for Vonnegut and a means by which he could portray the events of Dresden whilst directly subverting the tropes of the typical war narrative- the aggressive masculinity, the brutality, the heroism, so that concept is underlying the creation of Tralfamadore. Including the books doesn't invalidate the Tralfamdorian narrative, but rather gives rise to another layer of possibilities. They make you question if Billy is being completely accurate in his presentation of Tralfamadorian philosophy, and in fact, I think, add to the idea that there is no inherent truth; before those hints, I, like many other people, accepted both Tralfamadore and Billy's presentation of it as fact. But the hints that Billy may have PTSD remind us that objectivity is impossible and we can't just take the Tralfamadorian narrative as a given, and we definitely can't take what Billy tells us about Tralfamadore as a given.

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  3. Annemily HogansonMarch 17, 2018 at 5:04 PM

    I like that it is uncertain whether or not Tralfamadore is real. If it is only a coping mechanism, it would enhance Vonnegut's anti-war message by showing how the war damaged Billy so much that he had to turn to another planet to cope with it. If it were entirely factual, it would enhance Vonnegut's anti-war message by showing how ultimately pointless wars are. The ambiguity enables both messages to exist. If Tralfamadore is only a coping mechanism, I'm not sure if it's actually very helpful. It does prevent him from being completely overwhelmed by traumatic experiences. But Billy's complete acceptance of death prevents him from finding meaning in his life or relationships.

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  4. Adam Mao (johnuger)March 17, 2018 at 6:45 PM

    Nice post! I definitely think that the Tralfamadorians is Billy's way of coping with his war experiences. After all, different people deal with trauma in different ways. As for the second question, I don't really think that knowing the end of the universe is too scary. First, the end probably would come much after my time, so I probably would never have to experience it. Second, it would probably be almost instantaneous. If death came for me in such a small time, I wouldn't be too afraid because I would die so fast that I wouldn't even know about it.

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  5. KatApril 4, 2018 at 7:33 AM

    I like that you said that Tralfamadore was Billy's truth because, regardless of whether Tralfamadore actually exists within the novel (or within real life I mean who knows), it is the reality that Billy lives in. I think the fact that Billy had to come up with a whole new planet and method of viewing life speaks to how destructive war can be to a person's mental health, which adds a compelling aspect to the novel. Most people reading Slaughterhouse Five would be really skeptical about Tralfamadore, but if they understand that war drove someone to actually believe something that seems so preposterous to them, then Vonnegut has successfully commented on the destructiveness of war.

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