“Poo-tee-weet”

I was left somehow with an empty feeling with the ending of the book. As if it hadn’t concluded anything we didn’t already know, or maybe saying that all his book was a stupidity with the last sentence “Poo-tee-weet”.

There is not much to say that hasn’t been said before about the book. The last three chapters didn’t hold any new revelations, any new insight on the book. But if I had to make conclusions about this book, and stick to them, I’d say that Billy’s insanity becomes clearer in the end. It’s not confirmed, it’s not a final conclusion, it’s simply an implication we can make based on the facts. I had mentioned in previous blogs that probably the idea of the Tralfamadorians came from the novels of Kilgore Trout, because he had read them during a time in his life where he had to rebuild his beliefs. In the last chapters, an extra novel is mentioned, The Big Board, and it’s this novel that for me could confirm Billy’s insanity. It talks about two humans (man and woman) who are taken by extraterrestrials to a distant planet, and are displayed in a zoo there. For me, that IS Billy’s story, just as a Tralfamadorian would say, it has been there all along, and always will be.

Another thing that could be said is about Vonnegut’s appearances in the story, which was the most changing factor in the book. We thought he was an invisible character; then that he was a real character in Billy’s life, that they had met; then, that he was the only real character in the book, and that all other characters represented something related to war. That is a dilemma I will never have answered, but as far as I know, I’m confident to say that Vonnegut made appearances in the book to connect it to the real world. Evidently Billy and Billy’s story is fictional, but it might portray factual things about life, about war, about life after war. So with the purpose of us not getting lost in the imaginary world of Billy, the author connected it to himself, to keep it real.

The appearance of Professor Rumfoord from Harvard gives an interesting opinion. Why? He is seeking to write a book about WWII, and he wants to mention the huge success and necessity that was Dresden’s fire bombing. Billy is his roommate, but Rumfoord doesn’t show the slightest interest for Billy or his story about the Dresden fire bombing. I think this could be seen as Vonnegut’s way of critiquing historians who write about events like that. They never capture the whole truth about the moment, they make it sound heroic and necessary, but it will never be seen that way by people like Billy who actually lived through it. It comes to say: was all that slaughter really necessary? Was it really an act of heroism to kill so many people? It says that no one, as intelligent as they might be, seeks to write the whole truth about an event like that, because like Vonnegut says at the beginning, there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

That brings me to my last point, the “Poo-tee-weet”. Is Vonnegut implying that his entire book isn’t more intelligent than a bird’s sound? Because there is nothing intelligent to be said about a massacre. Could his book be replaced by a simple “Poo-tee-weet” after a massacre? 

Search for Meaning

During “Chapter 7”, Vonnegut went back to the classical narrator style he had used for all of the chapters, except “Chapter 6”, like I talked about in my past blog post. I think that during this chapter the Tralfamadorian ideology of “how humans see time” is enforced a bit, and another piece is added: Tralfamadorian think that everything on earth (humans and animals) is a machine. We see just a snapshot of the object, we don’t get to understand the object fully, and we understand it on three dimensions because we can’t perceive the entirety of the fourth one. Objects change through time, so when we see it, we understand it at that given time. This novel follows somehow that idea. If we were able to perceive the entirety of time, we’d understand Billy’s life perfectly, but as we are incapable of that, we perceive each moment in his life. And that is how Vonnegut makes the character (Billy) evolve, and how he explains/describes him to us, attempting for us to see Billy entirely. We catch glimpses of “different” Billys, and in that manner, we get to form a big picture of him.

By far, the most interesting part of this chapter was that there finally was a literal hint that all of Billy’s time travels might be just dreams. Just after his head surgery, he remains unconscious for two days. Vonnegut wrote that in those two days, Billy dreamt some things that were real, and some that weren’t. Those that were real were the time travels. Things in the book start making more sense, they start sticking more to reality. Those dreams that were real, is Billy simply going “back in time” in his head, re-living the moments of war. Which, I think everyone would agree, are absolutely traumatizing. Those dreams that are real are actually memories, that because of their atrocity, he cannot forget. The brain is designed to make patterns, good or bad, it makes no difference, so people tend to constantly go back and remember those things, not because they want to, but because they cannot help it.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but this book reminds me a lot of Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. The author was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist that lived during WW2. He was a survivor of the Holocaust, and died in 1997 due to hear failure. But that`s not important. In his book, he describes the Holocaust, not on a physical level, but on how the tortures on a day to day basis affected the mind and spirit. How they were destroyed during the Holocaust. In the book he talks about why so many people that survived the Holocaust committed suicide right after they were released. Now that sounds a bit stupid doesn’t it? Surviving the biggest tragedy in the world, and then simply taking your life away. Frankl has another approach, which made me think about Billy’s time in the mental ward, and his constant “time travels” to the war. After people have gone through that much suffering, their minds (at an emotional level) and spirits are completely destroyed. The body survives, but what is the body without a spirit? Without a mind? They have no more faith in life, it holds no value to them, and that is why they commit suicide. For people who don’t do that, like Billy, they constantly go back to the events that changed their life; the events that managed to destroy their belief in life, in an eternal search for his life's meaning. 

Billy Pilgrim says...

To be honest, I didn’t enjoy “Chapter 6” as I have enjoyed the rest of the book. During this chapter I had the feeling, again, that Billy’s story branched out from a central plotline, which is his war story. Unlike the rest of the book, where that sensation was completely lost in the Tralfamadorian-like entanglement of ideas. Although, what did interest me pretty much in this chapter, was how the narration seemed different than the other chapters. In the past chapters it was Vonnegut telling us Billy’s story, as if it was a Tralfamadorian book, giving us details about it, making us question everything we thought about the book, and most interestingly, making himself part of the book, without ever making it autobiographical. But during this chapter, although Vonnegut does mention himself when they arrive at Dresden, he was more distant from the story. That is absolutely clear when he writes “Billy Pilgrim says…” twice. He makes it clear to the reader, that what he is writing, is Billy’s opinion, is what Billy claims happened, as if he were directly quoting Billy. That detail makes me think that Vonnegut doesn’t really believe in that part of the story, as if he was implying Billy was crazy, and frankly, I agree. I know that it is a pretty crazy idea that Billy was kidnapped by aliens, and that he is unstuck in time, and so on. But I didn’t have a problem with that: maybe because it might or might not be in Billy’s head, we’ll never know: or maybe because of the way Vonnegut wrote it, we never doubted it: or finally, because neither I nor anyone has lived what Billy claimed to live, so we are able to imagine it, but in this chapter, Billy talks about the future of the REAL world. He says there are zap guns, Chicago has a hydrogen bomb dropped in it, and that he becomes famous. Those things mess with my reality, because I know none of those are true. That’s why I think Billy is more delusional than ever, I can’t imagine any of those details about the “future” real world, because I know how the real world was and is.

Another interesting detail that caught my eye was the hatred and wrath that consumed Paul Lazzaro (he is a coward, HE never takes revenge, he sends someone to do it for him), which led him to always want to take revenge. I know that he is a “bone and flesh” character like Billy, or Vonnegut, but, couldn't it be possible, that all of them aren’t actually real? That Vonnegut is the only real character of the book. And that the rest of the characters represent different aspects of Vonnegut’s mind which were affected by war. I know it’s a bit of an abstract idea, but it could actually be possible that Vonnegut created all those characters to represent different things of Vonnegut that were affected by war, and the story revolves around his brief appearances in the book. In this order of ideas, Lazzaro could represent Vonnegut’s hate towards the Germans, and his feelings of revenge towards them.

I don’t believe in that interpretation of the book 100%, it’s rather complex, and I don’t have any true foundations to support the theory (maybe for now). But I thought it was important to mention that this thought came to mind.