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.