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Kurt Vonnegut as Billy Pilgrim's Case Worker: Slaughterhouse Five Reread for the Era of PTSD
by Neil Earle, American Popular Culture
“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.”