Billy=Vonnegut and Vonnegut=Billy

The third chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five offers more of the same. Normally that would be a bad sign. However, in this case it is interesting. Vonnegut continues to play around with the idea of time. Vonnegut transitions between Billy Pilgrim’s life very smoothly. He seamlessly shifts between a war prisoner in Germany and a dull optometrist years later. Realizing that Vonnegut can transition between stories proved a point that I made in my first two reading blogs: time is circular. While reading the first two chapters I thought that the circularity of time could be ascribed to the novel in general, now I’m beginning to think that Billy’s life is the subject of the phenomenon. Why? There is a poster on Pilgrim’s office that reads: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” While most readers may think that that poster represents the importance of the chapter, I think that the line that follows is the true axis on which this chapter rotates. The next line says that Billy can’t change the past, the future, or the present. This represents the abysmal state of mind that Billy is in, furthermore, it might even reflect the frustrated Vonnegut in the “preface” to the book. This suggests that Billy represents Vonnegut. In the war Billy is driven by the unexpected, the ambiguity of life as a prisoner. Later in his life, he falls asleep on the job, falls asleep on his life. This represents the hopelessness of war, the exhaustion of a life by the horror of violence. I can trace this to the book Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden.

In Black Hawk Down, US Army Rangers are forced to hold off innumerable waves of militia attacks. The soldiers that survive this ordeal live the rest of their life dealing with post dramatic stress disorder and start to turn towards madness. This poses a real-life example of what Billy’s life is. I’m not saying that we should dismiss the events of the story because of the protagonist’s madness. Insanity can be traced to the roots of the plot and the eerie nature of the narrative style. Vonnegut could have seen himself in the eyes of Pilgrim. Furthermore, the strangely familiar anonymous narrator and the lunacy of Billy seem to fit in, could they be the same person?