Thursday, March 13, 2014
Poor Billy
I really feel bad for Billy in Slaughterhouse Five. The poor guy got picked on by almost everybody when he was in the war, and after the war he was in an accident and lost his wife as a result. It's quite saddening, especially since Billy is just so seemingly innocent but he seems to have rotten luck. He's captured not only by the Germans after being ditched by the two real scouts with no weapons and some really poor quality clothes. He also gets abducted by aliens, which sucks, because who likes being abducted? He manages somehow to survive the bombing of Dresden but years later ends up in a plane crash. He survives, but while he's in the hospital his wife, who's completely freaking out, gets into an accident, isn't physically injured, but ends up dying of carbon monoxide poisoning when she gets to the hospital that Billy's at. Nobody seems to take Billy seriously either. Even his own daughter is convinced that he's crazy. I can't help but feel sorry for him because of this. To me, it seems that the reason Billy claims he was abducted by Tralfamadorians is because he needs a way to cope with what he's experienced and lost, which just makes me feel sorrier for him. Overall I feel that Billy is a character that's very easy to feel sorry for and one that you should feel sorry for.
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Oh, but for Billy, abduction by aliens doesn't seem to "suck" at all. He's at his most content when he's under the dome on Tralfamadore, reclining with Montana Wildhack and telling stories about the war. Whereas his dreamy, glassy-eyed approach to the world seems to generate nothing but anger and impatience in his fellow soldiers in the war, and people in Ilium seem to see him as a harmless but somewhat eccentric non-entity (that is, before he starts spreading the word about Tralfamadore), under the dome he is appreciated, praised, listened to. The simplest movements (getting up and stretching in the morning) earn him a round of applause. We can view the Tralfamadorian sections as a fantasy of peace and acceptance for Billy, just as their view of time gives him a profound sense of peace about his own life--and death.
ReplyDeleteNow, of course, we could still view this whole scenario with pity--the poor guy is so devastated by the war, he's hallucinating aliens. But that negativity is not in fact reflected in Billy's own account of the experience.