Giving In

Hallucination, in my opinion is the result of oppressed dreams and desperate solutions one’s mind creates in response to our life dilemmas. We can see this in the character Billy, of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Billy, an optometrist who fought in the Second World War, is obsessed on telling the world about a group of people called Tralfamadorians who have interesting conclusions about death and time. For example, the say that dead beings are “still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 9-10) This shows a different kind of immortality I had never considered, it isn’t that one’s actions stay on earth as the story of our world and the effect we had on it, both positive and negative, but the moment to moment immortality, the never-ending movie of the same moment that is somehow stored in the universe. Quantum physicists have concluded that time does not exist. From this, we can conclude that Vonnegut is showing how his character, Billy, is trying to find a reason for how people come and go, changing his tragedies for an all encompassing concept, that may sound like a hallucination but may in fact be true, even if it is difficult for our minds to grasp the idea in its entirety. Science fiction always sounded hallucinatory when originally published, to later become prophetic of real scientific discoveries and truths.

Due to his situation, the loss of his wife, the plane crash of which he was the only one to survive and the war he lived, he needs an answer to the destiny of the people who left and if he will ever see them again. Following this logic he creates the following description of life after death. “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”” (Vonnegut, Pg. 10) Once I heard that the only thing that’s sure is that one is going to die, for so, this extremist point of view has a basic idea, to understand death as a natural thing that shouldn’t influence the living beings, since their were many other moments where this death didn’t exist. We don’t just see this in Billy’s words but in his actions too, as he gives us a strange and different approach to his wife’s death.

Being able to overcome difficult situations is probably the hardest thing a human being has to do, being able to do so as Billy does is absolutely astounding. But this makes Billy a sad person, who, through Vonnegut’s descriptions appears as the suicidal people I talked about in my last blog. In the following maxim, Billy is being rescued from the deepest part of a swimming pool where his father is trying to teach him to swim by the method of “sink or swim”. “He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that.” (Vonnegut, Pg. 16) Being convinced that life would never be good for him, that he would never have joy, young Billy feels he is destined to die, but in a way what Vonnegut shows, is that we are all destined to live and learn through suffering since we already know we are destined to die. We each must still find meaning to this journey even if it has an inevitable ending. We each need to use death as an advisor not send death inappropriate early invitations.