Is Tralfamadore Healthy for Billy?

From the simplest of issues to the greatest of them, humans have had many different ways of dealing with problems. You could face them "head on", or give them time. You could block them out and try to ignore them, or in some cases, solve them. However, with mental problems like trauma, you can't simply "solve" them practically. You must learn to live in the mind with those scars.
We can only imagine what it's like to go through war, and it's not pretty. Muddy boots is the least of your worries. You're constantly feeling as if it's your last moment, as death constantly bites at your heel. You make friends, you lose friends. Your delusional image of the epic war hero shatters as the truth hits you hard. Billy survived, while many, many others didn't. And Billy had a pretty nice living after the war, while many others didn't. But no matter how great Billy's life was on the outside, his heart was scarred from what he experienced to the point that he had to literally imagine himself leaving the planet for several years. It was to the point that he couldn't even take therapy on Earth. He needed Tralfamadore to assure himself that the war was just a bad time in his life, and that he can just try to ignore the bad parts and go to the happy parts of his life instead. From Tralfamadore, he is able to leave the war times of his memories to jump to other times.
Even though Billy can jump  through time, I think he lost his ability to "live in the moment". He already knows what's going to happen, and therefore feels like he shouldn't change anything and he constantly just sits back and lets it all happen again. He doesn't feel the urge to have a better future, because he already knows that future. There is no suspense, or hope, for Billy.
At the same time though, we can't ignore that Tralfamadore has kept Billy from losing ll hope in his life. Tralfamadore moments are the highlight of his days, and it gives him a sense of ultimate peace wit his life that he already did what he did, and now he can just sit back and let it go, in a sense.
What do you guys think? Does Tralfamadore help Billy more than it hurts him?

Comments

  1. Massive PeanutbrainMarch 25, 2018 at 6:24 PM

    I think that it can be healthy as long as Billy doesn't "abuse" it. Going to Tralfamadore is an escape from the real world, which for some people they really need that, but if Billy relies heavily on Tralfamadore to deal with real-life issues then there could be a problem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. CatalinMarch 31, 2018 at 12:40 PM

    I like your point that Billy has not really learned how to cope well with his PTSD from the war, and that that's why he has invented Tralfamadore to be able to cope. But I'm not quite sure that in Vonnegut's narrative, Tralfamadore is meant to not exist. In the book it almost seems like Tralfamadore is just another place Billy travels to, just like he travels to different places he has been to in his lifetime, he also travels to different planets, but I also like your idea that that part is a figment of Billy's imagination.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownApril 2, 2018 at 11:18 AM

    By inventing Tralfamadore (or, maybe, actually visiting it), Billy gets the helpful perspective that the bad times don't really matter because there are good times to live in. That's let him cope with everything and still function pretty well (e.g. when he convinces his veteran's hospital roommate that he was actually in Dresden). He did seem to decline towards the end of the book, like when he left for New York to fulfill the circumstances of his death. But the decline would have come earlier if he hadn't been coping well.

    -Reed

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kevin's Transformation

Throughout Kindred , we see how Kevin's ideas transform as he struggles between the early 18th and late 20th centuries. Even in the 20th century, we see how Kevin innocently still held some watered down ideas of white supremacy and power over Dana. We can see this in the way he rudely asked Dana to type his writing on the typewriter and how he assumes Dana will unpack the boxes when they move to their new house. We also see this play out from the beginning of their relationship, though in a good way, as Kevin buys Dana lunch and generally supports the marriage. None of these cases are life threatening or outrageously terrible, but the relationship has a trace of male white supremacy and female black subordination. However, Kevin starts to resemble the white man of the antebellum South as he is pulled back in time with Dana. For one, there is a lot of danger in the role he plays acting with Dana as her slave master. He adjusts to his role pretty fast, and even seems like a harsh ma...
Read more

Balancing attonism and Jes Grew in 2018

After reading different blog posts, I wanted to combine some ideas and add in my own of attonism and Jes Grew today. Throughout the centuries, Jes Grew and attonism have taken different forms, as we see in Mumbo Jumbo.  We see Jes Grew in theology, mythology, and musical forms and dance such as jazz, ragtime, and even hip hop and rap. We see attonism in science, math, philosophy, and more traditional musical forms and dance such as classical music and ballet. There are tons more of examples too of how attonism and Jes Grew take shape in our lives and in the past. But the conflict I saw between Jes Grew and attonism, taking out the racial conflict and applying the idea more generally, is that of mind vs. heart. In the sciences and math, attonism is in the focus on our intellect and ability to prove something right for ourselves, strengthening our minds and focusing more on material knowledge and thinking. In the arts, its in the romanticist paintings, or the constant rhythm and...
Read more