I think I may have found a possible loophole in Slaughterhouse-Five. But first, I should clarify some assumptions that I have, to see if my understanding of the book is correct.
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1). We can use the book metaphor with Billy Pilgrim's unstuckness: We view his life like we flip through a book, seeing different parts of his life whenever we want, because he is living his entire life simultaneously. Vonnegut is just giving us snippets of the book that is Billy's life to make Slaughterhouse-Five, but Billy is living his entire life simultaneously.
2). There is no "present-day Billy", because he is unstuck and has no intermediate, baseground from which he can leap forward and backward in time. He belongs to every part of his life equally.
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Then, how can Billy be aware of the bombing of Dresden, thirty days before the actual bombing, while walking in the parade in Dresden? (this is page 192 of my version, but it is the fat version. The actual number should be closer to 180 I think. It starts "Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to smithereens and then burned--in about thirty more days...)
Using the book metaphor, how can a character know what is going to happen to him in the future? Characters in books just live through the plot like a normal person in linear-time life would. With Billy's unstuckness, he just lives each part simultaneously. He jumps from page to page in the book that is his life, but lives them normally.
Transitioning to the second assumption that I made. If it is true, then there is no Billy that knows of the bombing beforehand. With the book metaphor, there is no character reading the book outside of the plot; there is only a character in the plot. He is living that parade in the streets of Dresden just like it was the first time. In fact,just saying that Billy learned of the bombing suggests linear time (and for Billy, there is no such thing as linear time), that there was a point in time that he didn't know of this bombing, then a later point in time that he learned of the bombing, when in Billy's unstuck life, there is no before and after.
Main point: Billy doesn't know what is going to happen to him, he's living the moment like it's structured, just like it's the first time.
This paragraph confused me (actually there's also the part where Billy' knows that the aliens are coming for him). If my assumptions are incorrect or I'm missing something, please let me know!
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1). We can use the book metaphor with Billy Pilgrim's unstuckness: We view his life like we flip through a book, seeing different parts of his life whenever we want, because he is living his entire life simultaneously. Vonnegut is just giving us snippets of the book that is Billy's life to make Slaughterhouse-Five, but Billy is living his entire life simultaneously.
2). There is no "present-day Billy", because he is unstuck and has no intermediate, baseground from which he can leap forward and backward in time. He belongs to every part of his life equally.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Then, how can Billy be aware of the bombing of Dresden, thirty days before the actual bombing, while walking in the parade in Dresden? (this is page 192 of my version, but it is the fat version. The actual number should be closer to 180 I think. It starts "Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to smithereens and then burned--in about thirty more days...)
Using the book metaphor, how can a character know what is going to happen to him in the future? Characters in books just live through the plot like a normal person in linear-time life would. With Billy's unstuckness, he just lives each part simultaneously. He jumps from page to page in the book that is his life, but lives them normally.
Transitioning to the second assumption that I made. If it is true, then there is no Billy that knows of the bombing beforehand. With the book metaphor, there is no character reading the book outside of the plot; there is only a character in the plot. He is living that parade in the streets of Dresden just like it was the first time. In fact,just saying that Billy learned of the bombing suggests linear time (and for Billy, there is no such thing as linear time), that there was a point in time that he didn't know of this bombing, then a later point in time that he learned of the bombing, when in Billy's unstuck life, there is no before and after.
Main point: Billy doesn't know what is going to happen to him, he's living the moment like it's structured, just like it's the first time.
This paragraph confused me (actually there's also the part where Billy' knows that the aliens are coming for him). If my assumptions are incorrect or I'm missing something, please let me know!
I have found myself confused with similar things throughout this novel. In other books I have read, time travel falls into the typical "I am in the present and now I am going forward or backward in time and then I will return to the present." Slaughterhouse 5 confused me because it both has that going for it as you just described--but it also talks about how Billy is in every time at once and flits in between all of them. This leads to the question of whether Billy's consciousness or maturity changes depending on what time he's in or if he has a perpetual consciousness that never changes.
ReplyDeleteThere's no way for such discussions NOT to be confusing. Now, a Tralfamadorian would say this is because of our inherently limited perspective, our "partial" understanding of the complete nature of time. But when we try to make sense of what this way of experiencing reality actually *means* for Billy in any given moment, it's extremely hard to unravel. He "becomes" unstuck at a particular point--so presumably before that he was experiencing life as anyone else would. But then once he's "unstuck," these earlier experiences already have their structure, and he can't do anything about anything but walk through the same paces again.
ReplyDeleteAnd Vonnegut can't *quite* do the true Tralfamadorian style, as even his "moments" are given a narrative structure (and, as we've talked about, the war sections still proceed in a linear fashion over the course of the novel). I'm more and more thinking of this whole time-travel idea as a kind of projection of Billy's, a way to accommodate his seemingly absurd experience without forcing it to conform to the strictures of narrative. He finds a comfort in the idea that everything always has happened just as it was going to happen--and a big part of the point is that this is really hard for us earthlings to get our heads around, "stuck" as we are in time.