Literature Fueled by PTSD

We’ve been talking a lot about the use of fiction in Slaughterhouse five lately, and it has gotten me thinking. Why did Vonnegut decide to put the Tralfamadorians into his book? They don’t really seem necessary, and in some cases are just plain weird. How did he even come up with that kind of story? It sounds like something from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Anyways, it got me thinking about PTSD. See, we learn that Billy doesn’t want to talk or think about the bombing of Dresden because of how traumatized he was, and he is only able to do so when he is millions of light years away from home. Maybe Vonnegut is in a similar type of situation. I mean, we learn in the first chapter of how hard it was for him to write this book, and how he wasn’t able to do it for more than 20 years. There’s also this weird connection between Billy Pilgrim and Vonnegut, where it almost seems like Billy is a younger version of Vonnegut, reliving the trauma of Dresden. What if Vonnegut was suffering from a similar case of PTSD to Billy Pilgrim. What if he was unable to write the book for so long because he just couldn’t get himself to mentally relive that horrible event. My guess is that he, like Billy Pilgrim, read a lot of science fiction after the war, and that he eventually realized that the only way to talk about his experience was to distance himself from it as much as possible. And since he didn’t have the technology to travel 100 million light years away, he created a character who could. And by doing that, he was able to mentally join that character, and only then was he able to think about what had happened in Dresden. The main reason that he put Tralfamadore and time travel into what is supposed to be his very serious war novel was that it was the only way he could actually deal with his experiences. If he was to be able to write about Dresden, he had to do it through a conduit. And that’s partly why we get such a weird first chapter. He ends up being embarrassed that his long-awaited war novel about one of the most horrible events in history is actually a science fiction novel involving time travel. But that was the only way that he felt he could talk about it, and so that’s how the novel ended up being the way that it is. 

Comments

  1. Elliot GenglerMarch 15, 2020 at 12:52 PM

    At first glance, little green plunger men seem like a very weird coping mechanism for PTSD, but when you think about it more, it does make some sense. The Tralfamadorians seem to be able to completely detach from everything, and say "So it goes." This detachment seems like exactly what both Billy and Vonnegut want. In witnessing Dresden before and after the bombing, they have become attached to these deaths. Billy is able to escape through Tralfamadorian thought, and Vonnegut, who is still attached, wants to become like Billy, by writing this book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Zachary's History as Fiction BlogMarch 15, 2020 at 2:59 PM

    I agree it is interesting to consider whether Vonnegut creates Tralfamadore as a coping mechanism for Billy or himself. Vonnegut isn't exactly a traditional author in the relationship he creates between himself and his work, as he frequently appears throughout Slaughterhouse Five and even sets aside the first chapter just to discuss how hard the book was to write for him and how much of a failure he feels it is. We will never know, but to me, I assume Tralfamadore has to have a meaning more than just a coping mechanism.

    ReplyDelete
  3. NikaMarch 15, 2020 at 3:48 PM

    This makes a lot of sense! I find it interesting that you made the comparison of Billy to a younger version of Vonnegut. I remember somebody else saying in class that Billy is like the anti-Vonnegut, with them having opposite views on the war after it (i.e. Vonnegut refusing his sons to participate in massacre vs Billy being proud of his green beret son). However, you make an interesting contrasting point, that its quite possible that they are processing their trauma in a similar way.

    ReplyDelete
  4. 1000gamesMarch 17, 2020 at 2:42 AM

    Alot of Vonnegut's book actually feature some part of his life. I think there was one book about his son (I might be wrong)? I don't particularly agree that Tralfedorian are useless. It feels like they are a way into Billy's world. A way we can see how Billy look at Earth, time, and so on. He uses the tralfedorians to reflect on much of what he believes, therefore we can use it to look at his belief and the culture that shape those beliefs.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Steven BlankeMarch 19, 2020 at 2:11 PM

    I listened to the audiobook of Slaughterhouse-5 at the same time as I read it. As part of the ending credits, the reader of the book did an interview with Vonnegut where the two discuss the firebombing of Dresden, Billie Pilgrim, and Vonnegut as a soldier. As it turns out, Billie is based off a soldier named Edward Crone Jr. who was killed in the firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut called himself a good soldier, and spoke openly about the war, leading me to believe that he doesn't actually have PTSD from it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Alex HynesMarch 21, 2020 at 9:15 AM

    Your mention of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy got me thinking of the similarities between it and the Tralfamadorian elements of Slaughterhouse 5, since like Billy, Arthur Dent has a traumatic experience. He sees Earth get destroyed and is the last living person from Earth. Just thought I'd bring that up. Anyway, I like the argument that you make about the connection between Vonnegut and Billy. While I don't necessarily agree that the only reason Tralfamadore is in the book is just for Vonnegut's sake, it's an interesting thought.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MitchellApril 3, 2020 at 12:21 PM

      Adams and Vonnegut are definitely spiritual brothers when it comes to their use of science fiction tropes in absurdist and cartoonish ways as a form of social/cultural criticism and satire. There's a whimsical surface to the sci-fi elements, while also using this extraterrestrial perspective to defamiliarize Earth-values and to literally get us to contemplate our world from an exterior perspective. They were, of course, contemporaries, both writing in the wake of World War II, and they both might be said to use science fiction to "reinvent themselves and their universe," as Vonnegut writes of Billy and Elliot Rosewater reading Trout.

      Delete
  7. SashaMarch 22, 2020 at 8:40 PM

    This seems like a very likely explanation for me. Vonnegut's coping mechanism is Vonnegut's detachment is Billy's detachment is Tralfamadore. I also wonder if it's in some way a means of getting the audience to automatically accept and process some of the more out-there, and displeasing ideas that the Tralfamadorians act as a conduit for. It's in some way "safe" because it's an SF novel.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bledsoe's Elaborate Scam

Looking back on the college in Invisible Man, more and more oddities seem to stand out. From the weird religious feeling surrounding the Founder to the complete disregard for education, the entire institution seems completely backwards. For example, when one usually thinks of a college, one will think of an institution focused on learning and based around the needs of the students. While in Bledsoe’s college, the focus is instead on the white patrons that come and visit, as well as Bledsoe himself. When one really thinks about it, the college itself is just a con used to boost the status and wealth of first the Founder, and now Bledsoe.  Think about it, whenever the Founder is mentioned it is with a religious reverence. Even the old white men were seen crying about his death. It was also mentioned that everyone knew who he was, and he traveled around the country in a private train car surrounded by rich people. Whenever he would show up for one of his rallies, it would be comp...
Read more

Wright's Communist Bias

How did Richard Wright's affiliation with the communist party affect his depiction of the communists in Native Son  especially Jan and Max. Wright spend nearly eight years writing for the communists in Chicago, whether it was for one of their many magazines, or for a novel promoting communism. He formed close relationships with many of their members, and only left the party after having a falling out with a select few of the leaders. This could have influenced his depiction of the communist party in Native Son . On one hand he probably still was very fond of the communists, and would have written them in a better light, or on the other hand he could have sent a draft of the book to some of his former colleagues who could have then pressured him into making his depiction more favorable. I don't personally know very much about what the communist party was actually like in 1940s Chicago, but the books depiction of them is very favorable, which combined with Wright's connect...
Read more

The Harlem Conversation

            One of the really interesting things about the last three books that we’ve read is how closely together chronologically they were written. All of the different authors knew each other at least by name, and even wrote commentary on each other’s work. We’ve seen this especially with Wright’s review of  Their Eyes Were Watching God . Looking at this, we can then start to see these books as reactions to each other, or even as the authors themselves having a conversation or argument through their literature. All of these books were written during the Harlem Renaissance, and were very different expressions of black culture at the time, expressing different opinions of what exactly it meant to be writing black literature. The first of these books to come out was Hurston’s  Their Eyes Were Watching God , which was published in 1937 and focused mainly on expressing a very specific form of black culture in the south, almost completely disr...
Read more