Trauma in the Novel and the Quest for the
Tralfamadorian Release:
Failure to Achieve Organized Innocence
DIMINISHING STATUS AND AUTONOMY OF SELF IN WAR:
-Characters are casualties of war: self is lost
-Billy becomes unstuck in time, picked up by a flying saucer and taken to Tralfamadore
-Tralfamadorians: "shaped like plumber's friends, suction cup is on the ground, hand has green eye in palms, creatures can see in four dimensions. They pitied earthlings for being able only to see three."
-critical of human beings obsession with death and free will: they have been to 31 planets and only earthlings hold onto the illusion of free will
"the first thing I learned from the Tralfamadorians was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past...all moments past, present and future have always existed and always will exist."
-all moments are permanent and they can look at any one moment that interests them, so death becomes a particular moment in which an individual is not doing so well but death is in no sense final and absolute.
-so the Tralfanadorian perspective is one Billy Pilgrim longs to have; at the end of the novel, it seems as though Billy has achieved this innocent, cosmic, vast, divine perspective and accepts death and the deaths of others as anything but final.
-Does the quest for the Tralfamadorian vision diminish the horror of Desden or heighten it?
- since, from the Trlafadorian perspective, killing is futile because death is but one moment of many to inhabit, one would think that Billy's view of the millipedean life spectrum assuages the horrors he saw in Dresden. But, we know, that when Vonnegut brings Billiy Pilgrim in one of Vonnegut's drunken stupors, Billy's breath seems to smell of "mustard gas and roses," the same smell of the dead German soldiers they had to dig out of the bombing. So-Billy and Vonnegut do not achieve the salvation of the Tralfamadorian vision and do not appease the psychological trauma caused by being POW's in Dresden and bombed by their own countrymen in WWII.
-"it's just an illusion on earth that one moment follows another like beads on a string..."
-human beings are great millipeeds with baby legs at one end and adult legs at the other end"
-WHAT WOULD DRESDEN LOOK LIKE TO THE TRALFAMADORIANS?
"the artificial wealth the earthlings sometimes create for other earhtlings when they don't want those other earthlings to inhabit earth anymore. Shells were bursting in the tree tops...with terrific bangs...little lumps of lead and copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shell bursts..."
-PH: this is a distant, aloof perspective on a bombing
-but the Tralfamadorians have war as well, but they ignore them because they cannot prevent them..."we spend eternity looking at pleasant moments"
-carpe diem theme
-clearing up our perceptual pipes of seeing: move in and out of the future, present and past.
-SUBLIME ESCAPE FROM REALITY:
a retreat from the horror of life and into a fantasy land on Tralfamadore
-if stress is great enough, simply exist through your mind to another place another time
-"he could scarcely distinguish between sleep and wakefulness...no important difference between walking and standing still" while at war: Billy has been so pychologically traumatized by horror and atrocity that his mind flickers like a tv set swinging in limbo between stations that bring forth the past, present and future.
-becoming unstuck in time assuages "derealizes" the horror of circumstances because he can escape them in his mind
-Billy achieves a sense of immortality because we know he lives on in the future because we see him in the novel after the war.
-Tralfamadorian literature: "we read telegrams all at once: produce an image of life that is beautiful, surprising and deep"
-we are encouraged to view life panoramically, panaoptically but we cannot, but Billy can.
-Vonnegut creates himself in the character of Kilgore Trout:
Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension:
"causes of diseases are all in the fourth dimension...earthling doctors cannot treat these dimensions because they could not see their causes"
Trauma: causes of trauma are unseen, unknown in the three dimensions we see.
-Metatextuality and Vonnegut as character:
aware of itself as a novel...adds pathos to the novel
-Kurt Vonnegut personlizes the novel by admitting to being an old fart who drinks too much and who calls up old war buddies and girlfriends late at night. He calls Billy Pilgrim who seemed drunk on the other end of the line. All suffer from post-traumatic stress from the war. Both smell like "mustard gas and roses" from drinking too much...
"I've become an old fart with his memories, with his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown": Vonnegut cannot see the world as one continuum. He sees his life as finite and his death as final. He knows life is one way without a return fare.
-one reaches for the immortality of Tralfamadore but this failed quest only underscores the horror of our mortal, fatal lives here on earth
-Billy unravels during the war and after the war: ends up in a nonviolent mental patient Veteran's hospital near Lake Placid, New York three years after the war (1948)
-trauma is not limited to the war because the doctors believe that the war is not the cause of Billy's problems but believe the trauma of being launched into the deep end by his father without knowing how to swim ruins him. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, Billy wets his pants in anticipation of being launched into the canyon by his brutal father. Trauma and pychologically damaging violence are not limited to war alone.
-horror: looking at faces of German guards looking at the moonscape of bombed out Dresden was triggered by the singing quartet.
-YEARNS FOR A RETURN TO INNOCENCE:
-"Billy became unstuck in time and he saw that late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War...American planes full of holes wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England...sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen...the opened bomb doors exerted a marvelous magnetism that shrunk the fires, gathered them into enormour cylindircal containers, and lifed the containers into the bellies in the planes...Germans sucked fragments from the crewmen and planes into long steel tubes...when the bombers got back to the base...the steel cylanders were taken from the racks and shipped bak to the USA where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylanders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals...minerals were shipped to specialists in remote areas who put them into the ground, to hide the cleverly so theyt would never hurt anybody again...the American turned into their uniforms and became high school kids again...and Hitler turned into a baby...That wasn't in the movie, Billy was extrapolating...everybody turned into a baby and all humanity wothout exception conpired biologically without exception to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve"
-erasure of experience, go back to pure innocence, turning the film backwards: but this can only be achieved in art, our personal histories and collective histories will not allow it:
this is the message of the novel-it evokes empathy in the reader for the difficulty of the human experience that is ruthlessly exposed to the inevitable, ongoingness of violence: "so it goes"
Vonnegut does not go back to prelapsarian Eden but returns to the place and events that traumatized him. In describing the scene in which the American POW's were commanded to dig the dead German bodies out of the rubble of bombed out Dresden, Vonnegut describes the "stink as roses and musturd gas," the very same smell of his breath when he drinks too much as an old man, writer at his home in Cape Cod.
-the psychological wound of the memory of the smell of the dead, German soldiers returns in the smell of Vonnegut's breath and will not go away.
Vonnegut never achieves the Tralfamadorian release of perception and we, as readers, feel and know the trauma that is the impetus of this novel.