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“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck
in time." This
simple declarative sentence takes readers of Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse Five inside the mind of one of the most fascinating
characters in American post-World War II fiction. It helps
all aspiring writers to know that even the agile Vonnegut
had to struggle for years to find a proper vehicle for conveying
the horror of World War II. The author's own personal inciting
event was, as is well known, the massacre of the German city
of Dresden in February 1945, and the gruesome after-affects
of war, any war, we are now learning. What is immediately
significant about Slaughterhouse Five and Billy Pilgrim is
that the very recently departed Vonnegut bears witness in
this work to the fact that there are walking wounded still
among us, suffering survivors from what has been called “the
last good war." Even that descriptor was challenged
lately by World War II veterans of the “Greatest Generation" recently
quoted on PBS. One articulate ex-serviceman suggested the
characterization of the “necessary war" instead.
This revisionist point hits home with jarring effect as military
transports ferry back to our shores the severely traumatized
victims of “Operation Enduring Freedom," the
very controversial invasion and occupation of Iraq, an operation
that seems, at this date, very much stuck in time.
This essay briefly reviews evidence from within the text
of Slaughterhouse Five that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD) is not only setting off Billy’s fantasy voyages
to Tralfamadore but also lies behind the erratic, heavy-footed
trajectory of his sad winding path through post-war life.
It argues that Vonnegut has done the culture a favor by creating
a superb literary portrait of the very archetype of the walking
wounded – Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut offers with his trademark
wryness an at times bemused portrait of a man becoming psychologically
disoriented from experiencing griefs simply too great to
be borne, a theme in Western literature that could be profitably
traced back to the beginnings of Western literature. It is
at least possible to read the “heart-devouring anger" of
Achilles over the death of Patroculus in Book IX of The
Iliad and the almost spastic (for the Bible) “Lament" for
David over Jonathan in Samuel-Kings as ancient evidences
of PTSD. Thus the latent sub-theme inside Slaughterhouse
Five advances the claim that this work can be profitably
restudied alongside insights from two of the clearest-communicating
psychologists of the late twentieth century, men whose work
was appreciated on the popular level: Dr. M. Scott Peck,
author of The Road Less Traveled, and Dr. Viktor Frankl in
Man’s Search for Meaning. First, it is good to seek
some definitions: Exactly what is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD)?
At its simplest, PTSD is, in the words of Dr. Robert Ursano,
an expert at the Uniformed Services University of the Health
Sciences located in Bethesda, Maryland – the military’s
medical school – an “event-related disorder brought
on by traumas ranging from rape to serious motor vehicle
accidents." The stress levels involved are so intense
that in many cases brain chemistry is altered, a condition
that leaves behind such affects as nightmares, anxiety, social
withdrawal, and depression. It is estimated that one in eight
returning Iraqi veterans are so afflicted. PTSD has been
called many things – soldier’s heart, nostalgia,
shell-shock, combat fatigue. The stark and all-consuming
pathology involves intensely painful flashbacks to the precipitating
event. Journalist Susan Dentzer’s interview with Clide
Judy in Morgantown, West Virginia, was illustrative. Judy
was an air force pilot in WWII on a plane whose engines failed
off the coast of Yugoslavia. One crew member’s chute
didn’t open; another fell into the sea to be (possibly)
eaten by sharks. Judy was rescued by the Navy but still sees
the faces of those lost comrades. Vietnam-era veteran Jim
Kirchmar’s flashbacks involve speeding down the highway
and worrying his wife to death when he relives his waking
nightmare of being ambushed in Vietnam.
In an understated matter-of-fact way, Kurt Vonnegut introduces
us to Billy Pilgrim’s predicament. He refers to Billy’s “constant
state of stage fright…he never knows what part of his
life he is going to have to act in next." The tell-tale
signs of PTSD are almost laconically narrated across Slaughterhouse
Five’s chapters two and three. They include the following:
- Billy’s shock treatment at a vet’s hospital
in Lake Placid, New York.
- Misery often attracts misery: While Billy was recuperating
from a plane crash in 1968, his overwrought wife committed
suicide.
- Billy visits a talk show in NYC and talks about being
abducted by a flying saucer to the horror of his button-downed
daughter.
- Promiscuous sexual outbursts function as a sedative:
thus Billy’s dazed-out drunken sexual encounter with
a woman on a gas heater at a New Year’s party in 1961.
- Billy’s great success at his Lion’s Club
speech – the
matching “manic bookend" to his intensely private
nightmares.
- Billy’s travels in his imagination to the Planet
Tralfamadore and being mated with porn star Montana Wildhack.
- His daughter finding him obsessively typing a letter
in his freezing cold rumpus room. This missive is being composed
at frantic, manic speed as it contains (to Billy, at least)
the truth about time, death, and infinity according to the
Tralfamadorians.
How does Vonnegut get all this obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive
detail down so well? He’s been there. He’s been
to the front and back. His experience of emerging from a
slaughterhouse in the city of Desden, which ironically protected
him from the Allied fire-bombing that killed 135, 000 people
the night of February 13-14, 1945, is the key. The casualties
were so high that night they surpassed both the fire-bombing
of Tokyo (83,793 dead) and the atomic blast on Hiroshima
(with 71,379 deaths). The dead were burnt by the German survivors
with flame-throwers before disease stalked the rest of the
city. These are literally and metaphorically searing encounters.
To emerge from an underground bunker and to view that carnage:
information overload! “Tilt!" goes the mind which
whirrs like the hands of a clock in some cartoon fantasy
sequence as it tries to process the pain. Hence, Billy’s
spaced-out behavior, the use of sexuality as a sedative or
escape, the obsessive concern with exceedingly narrow interests,
the beyond-sci-fi travels to Tralfamadore. So it goes.
The onset of Billy’s PTSD had already been prefigured
by his imaginary daydreams on the wet and soggy days as part
of a dazed American unit behind the German lines in December
1944. Scribe Vonnegut adeptly chronicles Billy’s inciting
event flowing from his own experiences, i.e. the author’s
being taken prisoner by the Germans during the numbing cold
hell of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944: “That is when
Billy first became unstuck in time." Popular memory
wants to incarnate the Bulge as a heroic American Thermopylae,
the men of the 101st Airborne courageously holding on at
Bastogne while the German panzers swirl around them. Heroism
there surely was, but Vonnegut has the foot-soldier’s
view, what the British call “the poor bloody infantry" perspective.
The text describes Billy as a “dazed wanderer" along
with three other G.I.s caught behind enemy lines. Vonnegut’s
prose begins to dance in these descriptions, even if it is
a danse macabre. The guns, writes the author, “make
a ripping sound like the opening zipper on the fly of God
Almighty." The profane undercutting is another method
of mental and emotional coping – horror outside partly
deflected by the retaliatory affect of language coming from
inside. Language is one of the few things men in combat still
have control over, the voice or recording camera inside their
heads taking it all in and yearning for expression. Or so
I theorize. Is this one reason why so many combat veterans
are legendarily profane?
Billy’s unit is “led" by the would-be John
Wayne of the outfit, Roland Weary, who expatiates with great
delight on such gruesome phrases as “the blood gutter," that
shallow groove in the side of the blade of a sword or bayonet.
Ugh. “Blood gutter." How harsh and grating to
civilized civilian ears! Vonnegut catches the exquisite details
because in times of extreme combat or deathly peril the recording
device inside the mind goes into overdrive. He is obviously
setting down his own intense traumas as a POW. This is incarnated
in such phrases as “the walnut stocks" of the
rifles, the “lethal bee that buzzed past his ear" and
the soldiers’ blood “turning the snow to the
color of raspberry sherbet." Beautifully, lyrical and
yet hideous – verbal snapshots from a time of horror
recollected in tranquility. It’s hard to come back
from the gates of hell. The average citizen can relate to
snatches of that encounter with split-second danger, either
on the freeway or being surprised from behind – the
blood pounding in your ears, the clutching breath, the feeling
that your nervous system has been traveling at cyber speed.
An acquaintance related his experience of January 1, 2005,
when his fine old Navy veteran father-in-law – who
never spoke of his nightmarish days and nights in the boiler
room of the destroyer U.S. Stanly at Leyte Gulf and elsewhere – passed
away from stomach cancer in the next room. He died painfully,
but quickly in the final trauma after a previous night’s
suffering in agony. That was close enough to death for his
son-in-law, something most of the boomer generation have
ahead of them. Combat veterans say it is all so much more
intense because the danger is coming at you with the force
and speed of an express train. Time freezes as your death
seems to approach. Psychologist Archibald Hart has a phrase
for the affects of this: anhedonia. The reference is to the
pursuit of or the experiencing of exciting stimulation that
revs up the nervous system and adrenalizes the overdrive
capabilities of the body’s defense mechanisms. Hart
refers to it as a “being thrilled to death." The
result is often an apathy or numbness to the routine or more
mundane stress of normal life. Cue Billy Pilgrim driving
his daughter to distraction. Says Hart: “The recent
spate of sexual-acting out behavior of some top Christian
leaders is an example of what can happen when one is ‘thrilled
to death.’" Cue Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack
having wild and crazy sex in the Tralfamadorian experimental
zoo.
Clearly, if Billy’s PTSD/anhedonia is not addressed
sensitively and compassionately, he is going to regress into
complete mental illness. After his discharge in 1945, Billy
was given the prescription of the moment: shock therapy at
Lake Placid then sent home. As Vonnegut writes, he “married
his fiancée, finished his education and was set up
in business in Ilium by his father-in-law." This was
coping of a sort, a common pattern almost reminiscent of
the returning warriors depicted in the 1946 film, The
Best Years of Our Lives. Billy’s catalogue of misadventures,
tabulated above, shows that he was falling apart inside.
Yet the mind somehow still wants to work towards stasis,
some kind of healing. The poet Shelley was no psychiatrist
yet he diagnosed better than he knew when he creatively misquoted
John Milton’s famous line from Satan in Paradise
Lost: “The
mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of
hell, a hell of heaven." Again here is curious testimony
to the power of literature to heal as well as probe. It undergirds
Conor Cruise O’Brien’s summation in The Suspecting
Glance: “The study of literature is a social science.
It is concerned with the results of the most far-reaching
and subtle investigations that have been made into man’s
mind and passions and his life in society…."
What Vonnegut sets down so well in Slaughterhouse Five is
his protagonist’s attempt to find some kind of healing.
The mind seemingly never stops computing, tabulating, assimilating,
and reformulating the bytes of information it has digested.
Billy Pilgrim gives testimony to that. Though presented as
a fantasy element in the novel, the Tralfamadorians have
some good insights, the advantage of the other-worldly perspective.
In Billy’s reportage, they see time horizontally: “the
way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains." From
this perspective, Billy breathlessly concludes, all of life’s
moments are “permanent," and they can look at “any
moment that interests them." This approach outflanks
death, according to Billy. “When a Tralfamadorian sees
a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person in is in
bad condition in that particular moment but that the same
person is just fine in plenty of other moments." That,
at least, is one way out, one way to process carnage, to
perhaps mitigate griefs simply too great to be borne, if
only temporarily.
In counseling, we are told, it is important to listen to
the counselee’s stories. Their stories are often dressed
up fantasies that the mind has created to throw a screen
over reality or even to repress or deflect it momentarily. “Where
would we be without repression?" a UCLA professor of
literature asked his class. A good counselor doesn’t
stop there, however. Allowing plenty of time he or she must,
if possible, enter the counselee’s trauma and try to
disentangle the inciting event. If possible, the next step
is to replace it with other, better thoughts. The only way
to get air out of a bottle is to pour something else in.
A therapist trained by Dr. Viktor Frankl might proceed thus.
“You escaped. You made it"
“Yes, but other guys didn’t."
“True, but now try to make their sacrifices mean something. Redeem their
humanity, their nobility. Use their memory as a springboard to ‘redeem
the time.’"
That is one way forward, just possibly. The strategy is to enter Billy’s
world and try to lift him out of it, to try to create a sense of purpose from
the materials of chaos.
The popular psychologist, Scott Peck, who learned his trade on army posts,
incidentally, showed why the attempt must be made to restore balance to the
traumatized psyche.
Peck writes: "In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung: 'Neurosis
is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.' But the substitute
itself ultimately becomes more painful than the legitimate suffering it was
designed
to avoid. The neurosis
itself becomes the bigger problem. True to form, many will then attempt to
avoid this pain and this problem in turn, building layer upon layer of neurosis."
As simplistic as this first may seem, this starting-point has merit. The road
to recovery must begin somewhere. The sympathetic counselor will always be
checking her own assumptions and stand ready to change course if the diagnosis
isn’t
accurate. From diagnosis, it is possible to move very carefully to prescription.
Note how Peck’s insight fits Billy Pilgrim: "[W]hen we avoid the legitimate
suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth
that problems demand from us. It is for this reason
that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without
healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel."
Dr. Viktor Frankl moved beyond Peck. Frankl was an Austrian psychotherapist
considered the founder of the “third Viennese School" after Freud and Adler.
His philosophy, too, seemed deceptively simple. “Everything can be taken
from a man or a woman but one thing," wrote Frankl, “The last of
human freedoms [is] to chose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one’ way." Frankl had an uncanny success rate with suicidal
patients in the years before World War II. The ultimate perfection of his theories
came in the grimmest laboratory imaginable: Auschwitz concentration camp. Even
from there he emerged more convinced more than ever of a key fact of the human
experience: “A human being is a deciding being." We become stuck,
says Peck, and becoming stuck in time is one reaction formation to the death-dealing
blows life levels at us. This is one reason compassion is so important. As
Peck might have added, miming the interior dialogue of the traumatized: If
someone
is willing to suffer with me then perhaps suffering is not the worst thing
that could happen. Perhaps suffering has a purpose.
These insights begin to close the circle a little. Perhaps this is one reason
Vet Centers are springing up across the country. Some are beginning to realize
that severely traumatized victims need to get together to see that they are
not alone, to see others who have experienced legitimate suffering, and to
check
and revise what Peck calls “their maps of reality." By way of a conclusion,
one could do worse than recommend a rereading of Slaughterhouse Five as part
of the treatment. The clever Vonnegut, humanist to the end, has Billy Pilgrim
construct the best possible life he can in the face of the apathy and incomprehension
around him: “Nobody else suspected that he was going crazy. Everybody else
thought he looked fine and was acting fine." The human being is a deciding
animal. Billy has the sense, at least, to check himself into the mental ward
where he is introduced to the writings of science fantasy writer Kilgore Trout.
Trout’s titles open his mind to the possibility of time travel as well
as space travel, including his fantasy visits with Montana Wildhack, supposedly
a fellow abductee of the Tralfamadorians. The human propensity to construct
counter-reality is a significant part of this novel.
Arguably, this escapist fantasizing is not the way Peck or Frankl would have
wanted Billy to develop. The patient, however, at least showed the life signs
of busily trying to construct coping mechanisms for his malady. At the almost
quixotic level, Billy was trying to decide an alternate future. Coping? Yes.
Somehow in the middle of it all Billy is able to become as “rich as Croesus," marry
an adoring wife, have five optometrists working for him and invest in Holiday
Inns and Tastee-Freeze stands. Yet only his doctor knows the sad, sad truth: “Every
so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody
had ever caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet
thing Billy did, and not very moist." There is a poignancy to these words
that make the passage a candidate for the quiet emotional center of the book.
In a country that has gone on building Holiday Inns and Tastee-Freezes galore,
while its wars rage with morbidly increasing frequency, there seems less time
for focused attention on PTSD. Even less is there the opportunity for presenting
public awareness over therapeutic prescriptions for the veterans still suffering
from World War Two, let alone Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom.
Is this why Vonnegut’s case study seems haunting and prophetic at the same
time? Vonnegut has set down in profane but ultimately empathetic prose a fictional
case history of what America’s first notable war protestor, Henry David
Thoreau, wrote almost two centuries ago: “The mass of men live lives
of quiet desperation."
July 2007
From guest contributor Neil Earle
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