As I saw during the panel presentations, many see the Tralfamadorians as something Billy made up as a coping mechanism of his PTSD or simply to make more sense of life. While There are many reasons the Tralfamadorians were made for Billy in Slaughterhouse-Five, I definitely see more advantages of including the Tralfamadorians as something Vonnegut made up for himself.
From the first chapter, we get a sense that Vonnegut is having a hard time writing this book, whether it be that he doesn't want to glorify war or he finds it difficult to even write about the war in the first place, or both. Whatever it be, the Tralfamadorians help Vonnegut overcome his problem. From the Tralfamadorians point of view, there's nothing glorious about the war on earth, they simply see it as something that has happened, will happen, and will always happen in one of so many moments of time. The war has no special meaning to them. It's only humans killing more humans. There is no differentiation of German or American, and furthermore the Tralfamadorians see no pride in winning a war.They don't even focus on war because they only want to focus on the happy moments. Vonnegut adopts this apathetic-like sense of the Tralfamadorians when narrating how things happened from Billy's point of view, and thus this helps us to not think about the war in terms of which side is fighting which and but in terms of people dying who don't individually make a difference after the war is over.
The Tralfamadorians also help Vonnegut get the book done. Having the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five allows Vonnegut to switch to different time periods of Billy's life whenever he so chooses, which he does quite often. This allows Vonnegut to stop writing about a particularly depressing war scene if he can't go on and to switch to a part of Billy's of life when he wasn't in the war. This also helps Vonnegut to not have to remember everything that happened in Billy's life in a linear fashion, so Vonnegut doesn't have to write everything in order and draw all the connections from one scene to the other.
Including the Tralfamadorians has one last major advantage for Vonnegut. Instead of writing a depressing book about war, Vonnegut gets to focus on another, happier story that is all made-up, meaning he gets to decide where the story goes and exactly how it gets there. We as readers have already seen so many anti-war books and I for one definitely don't want to read a book that's only about the atrocities of war, nor does Vonnegut want to write one. The Tralfamadorians help to spice things up by making the book longer and more interesting to its readers.
This is an interesting idea. We could see his use of Billy as the protagonist as one kind of "distancing" mechanism (rather than having the central character be based on himself--instead, "he" shows up in brief, fleeting glimpses and that's it, so the memories are presented as personal, even if they in fact are). But then by taking Billy and sending him off to a distant galaxy, making him comfortable in bed with Montana and his audience of Tralfamadorian zoo-goers, Vonnegut himself achieves a kind of maximum distance or detachment from the events he's depicting in narrative form. He wants to "tell a story," as Montana asks of Billy, but as we see in chap. 1, he can't just start at the start and say "what happened."
ReplyDeleteFirst off, I think it's soooooooo cool that we wrote on the same topic, but totally different interpretations! You talked about how Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorians as a means of moving the storyline and as a vehicle for Billy's time travel which I didn't think about. I can totally see what you mean though. The tralfamadorians allow Vonnegut to tell the story of war in a whole different way. It allows the readers to compare Billy before the war to Billy after the war without telling the whole story of Billy's life. It makes approaching the topic of PTSD less stressful and uncomfortable. I took the Tralfamadorian's role in this as a way to emphasize how billy pilgrim doesn't make decisions, thus isn't held responsible for war damages, just like a child.
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