Science Fiction as a Coping Mechanism

Something interesting that has come up in class is the idea of science fiction as a coping mechanism for both Billy Pilgrim and Vonnegut himself. Until chapter 10, we had been operating under the assumption that at least in the universe of the novel, Tralfamadore and Billy’s time travel were real. The introduction of Kilgore Trout and his work begins to call this into question. For me, the first signal that everything might not be as we thought was the line “[Billy and Rosewater] were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.” Trout’s novels provided alternative ways of seeing and understanding the world, and the more we hear about Trout’s ideas, the more parallels  we see between them and how Billy experiences the world. When Billy has a strong negative reaction to the barbershop quartet at his anniversary party, Trout speculates that he has seen through a “time window”, a concept similar to Billy’s being “unstuck in time”. Billy later flips through a Trout novel The Big Board, about “an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.” This is remarkably similar to what happens to Billy and Montana Wildhack on Tralfamadore.

These similarities beg the question of whether Tralfamadorians and their view of time are real outside of Billy’s head, or if they are a coping mechanism he developed, building on the Trout’s works, to deal with his incredibly traumatic experiences. There certainly seems to be evidence to support this second possibility. Billy tends to come “unstuck in time” in moments of intense suffering or emotion, and jumps to either happier--or just blander--moments. One example of this is the first time Billy time travels. He is following the two scouts and Roland Weary through the German countryside, “cold, hungry, embarrassed, incompetent. He could scarcely distinguish between sleep and wakefulness now, on the third day, found no important differences, either, between walking and standing still”. All of a sudden, he is no longer in that moment, but before his birth, after his death, a child, and then an adult living in Illium before returning to WWII. This suggests that Billy’s time travelling could be a way of coping with trauma, and extreme physical and mental stress.

The Tralfamadorian worldview is also a tempting and convenient one for someone in Billy’s situation to develop. Billy has lived through some terrible things, but according to the Tralfamadorian way of seeing the world, none of them are his fault, and there’s nothing he could have done to prevent them. The moments were simply structured that way. It makes senseless death and destruction a bit easier to stomach to be able to say that although those people and cities aren’t looking so good right now, there are plenty of moments where they are just fine; moments where Dresden is still a beautiful and magical city, and its inhabitants are still alive. However, although this world view is comforting, it is not necessarily a good way to see the world (unless, of course, the Tralfamadorians actually are real). It absolves us of responsibility for the state of the world, and removes the very real need to reckon with and learn from the past.

It is also interesting to consider whether Vonnegut himself is using science fiction as a coping mechanism while writing this novel. Instead of simply telling us what happened in Dresden, he skirts around it for more than two hundred pages, telling us instead a story about someone he knew in WWII and their experience with time travel and aliens. Why? Perhaps as it is for Billy, science fiction is a way to frame the past in a way that makes it easier to deal with. Telling the story in this way also distances Vonnegut from the narrative. Instead of writing about his personal experiences in a linear fashion (as he says in ch. 1 he tried to do and failed), he is writing about them through Billy Pilgrim, and in a jumbled order that allows him to switch topics whenever he wants. Adding the Tralfamadorians brings in an element of fantasy that also provides distance from his very real experiences in Dresden. However, this explanation seems inadequate. Vonnegut’s writing is very deliberate, and he definitely seems aware of what he is doing by making Slaughterhouse Five a science fiction novel. Perhaps Vonnegut from Chapter One is not quite the same as Vonnegut the author. What do you think?