![]() Death becomes just one of many co-present moments in an atemporal tapestry. Manic Reversal: Vonnegut has his protagonist discover an upside to trauma’s temporal disruption: time is an illusion and the universe is actually timeless. We don’t talk about trauma we exhibit it indirectly. In Billy Pilgrim’s forced time travel, Vonnegut tackles trauma’s immunity to causal and temporal narrative by showing this disruption within the narrative itself. Structural Time-Busting: Vonnegut tackles the way in which trauma disrupts psychological time by giving us a story about a character whose actual timeline has been disrupted by aliens. While it is not unusual for novels to make use of fictionalized autobiography, this displacement turns what was supposed to be a story about Vonnegut and the bombing of Dresden into something hyper-fictional, in that it is a science fiction story in which the bombing itself is never directly represented. ![]() In doing so, he conveys something of the feeling of the narrative impotence of war, and points us more or less explicitly to some of the other themes outlined in this post.ĭepersonalized Fantasy: When he finally gets to his story, Vonnegut talks not directly about his own experience, but about the impossible experiences of a fictional character, Billy Pilgrim. Obsessional Meta-Narrative: Vonnegut begins by talking not about his war story, but the process of trying to tell his war story, and in turn the process of trying to tell his story by talking about the telling of it, and so on in a hopelessly infinite recursion (the “Yon Yonson” effect). How, then, does Vonnegut tell his story at all? He has a few strategies that might be seen as sublimated versions of various psychological defenses: And so, Vonnegut seems to say, the only thing that can be said about trauma involves something like the pre-linguistic, senseless utterances of birds: “poo-tee-weet.” They fail to resolve their trauma by telling its story.Īs the locus of total helplessness and violation, perhaps trauma cannot be accurately represented within a narrative, the very essence of which is to supply a sense of power and mastery by fitting raw experience into a causal framework. Ultimately, they fail to make sense of their experiences and actions in terms of temporal cause and effect: which is to say, in terms of a plot. In acting on trauma-often in repetitively self-destructive ways-they operate on a kind of unconscious procedural memory that, in its failure to meaningfully link representations, has a timeless quality. Survivors escape with their lives, and so escape this banishment on a physical level: but psychologically, they may become, like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, “unstuck in time.” In the form of flashbacks, their memories of trauma seem less like memories than re-experiencings. ![]() Why is war so hard to talk about? For one thing, it can be severely traumatic, constituted as it is by attempts by human beings to banish each other’s life stories from space and time and experience. ![]() That falsification is effected by the way in which such stories a) make war the pornographic object of prurient, sadistic interest b) glorify war, representing as powerful and heroic what is really a state of total, infantile helplessness c) depict something inherently impersonal-the massacre of enormous numbers of anonymous human beings-as a personal struggle between well-defined characters, protagonists and antagonists d) explain-via cause-and-effect plotting-something that is inexplicable. Slaughterhouse Five is a story about war, yet one that seems to advance the thesis that there can be no war stories that don’t entirely falsify the experience and significance of war. Listen to this (sub)Text prequel and get other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon. ![]()
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