Having taken the Hero's Journey class last year, the discussion of Billy Pilgrim's traits and value as a hero or protagonist was interesting to me. Although our curriculum has included a number of characters who deviate significantly from typical heroic classifications, I feel that Billy is especially unusual. He is not a dark, deep, brooding antihero, nor is he a morally-motivated hero of myth. In the vast majority of the scenes we see Billy in, he is devoid of passion and emotion entirely and takes complacency to an extreme; Billy is more willing to understand events as simply happening to him or the work of destiny as opposed to believing in his own capabilities. This perspective is of course only made more bleak by his curse of being "unstuck" in time, and although the exact details of what Billy could conceivably change are not explicated, it is apparent that he has no interest in interacting or altering the world around him in his past.
While this may make Billy Pilgrim unappealing or not relatable, I think Vonnegut does very well to create such a passive, defeated character as the protagonist for his anti-war novel. Aside from a pretty in-depth look at the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, Vonnegut provides an image of the profound hopelessness and desensitization that results from war. The clearest indicator of this is Billy Pilgrim's repetition of the phrase "so it goes" whenever death occurs in the novel, perhaps also in an attempt to elicit a reaction from the reader. This acceptance is just one example of how simple Billy appears from an external perspective, and he was likely written to be of mediocre intelligence. Yet, are not the majority of people in the world average? I think in Vonnegut's anti-war efforts he is trying to make a point about how ridiculous it seems to soldiers in the thick of battle to fit killing and war into metanarratives. We've said that Billy's "so it goes" phrase devalues loss of human life, but perhaps trying to rationalize the deaths of so many is just as problematic.
What's interesting is that Billy doesn't see "so it goes" as hopelessness and desensitization at all: He says it's something he learned on Tralfamadore, a custom he's adopted, almost as a reflexive religious mantra (like "God rest his soul" after mentioning someone who has died, or "Insha'Allah" in Islam after speaking of the future). For him (so he claims) it's a statement of peace, acceptance, everything in its place.
ReplyDeleteIt's so hard for the reader to adopt such an attitude toward death, we maybe take it as a provocation (and it may well be, in Vonnegut's mouth--most of the times it's included in the novel, it's the narrator, not Billy, saying it).
I feel like most people would make efforts to change things in the past with their knowledge of the future, but Billy's so passive he doesn't even bother. Not only would him trying to do things differently each time he visits a moment make the plot really complicated, it would get rid of all the ambiguity surrounding his sanity and the reality of his time travel. So that's another reason for him to be passive I guess--it makes things work. But your dehumanizing effects of war theory is almost certainly the main reason.
ReplyDelete"So it goes" definitely is Tramalfadorian. I understood the phrase to be making commentary on the whole "free will" aspect of the novel; these are things that just tend to happen, and things that we cannot prevent, so there's no point in understanding these events as anything more than things that just happen--so it goes.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if defeated/hopeless is the right word to describe Billy's character. True, he doesn't actively fight for his life (he knows he doesn't have to), but he still has goals for his life, namely to spread the Tralfamadorian world view. It's possible that the extraterrestrial perspective, including "so it goes," is just a coping mechanism, but I also think it gives him a lot of satisfaction and a new purpose in life that help steer him away from despair.
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