Liberating Powers of the Imagination

¶ … liberating powers of the imagination in Asher Lev's art and Billy Pilgrim's experiences with the Tralfamadorians

The Power of Imagination in Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

The imagination is a powerful force. So powerful, it can change people's methods of expression and help heal deep wounds with were left untreated by normal methods found within normal society. In the works of Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, the imagination is seen as a force which can foster further personal development in an unconventional way in order to help save particular individuals. Asher Lev uses his imagination to reconvene his past experiences with his current world of art, condemned by the community which fostered his past experiences. Billy Pilgrim uses his imagination as a coping method to help deal with the stress of a traumatic event basically ignored by his country, family, and friends. However, both works show the necessity of the imagination in an unforgiving world, and how it can provide solace and comfort when one's current environment provides none.

Chaim Potok's character in My Name is Asher Lev represents this conflict between one's individual feelings and thoughts in comparison to those feelings and thoughts of his community. Raised in a Hasidic environment, Asher Lev finds himself strangely connected, yet increasingly isolated from the people, places, and memories he called home. Like Billy Pilgrim, Asher Lev, whether consciously or unconsciously, chooses to explore his experiences in a foreign way from what is accepted and perpetuated within his Hasidic New York community. Rather than following the Rebbe's advice of following a more standardized and acceptable form of study, Asher Lev continues forth with his expressions through controversial paintings. This leads him into a strange world where he is forced to reconcile his past upbringing in Brooklyn with his much different imagination and expression of that imagination. Yet, Asher cannot reconcile his psyche completely with his community. Therefore, he uses his imagination through artistic expression to create a new experience for himself which both strangely isolates him and connects him to his community. The crucifixes, which he so passionately paints, represent his imaginative construction of his life as a child in the Hasidic Brooklyn community. These paintings, which later turn out to be his crowning achievements are his own artistic renderings of his past and his family. Yet, the crucifix is the most important symbol found in Catholicism, and therefore connects him to a world far beyond the Hasidic traditions of his youth. He uses the image of the crucifix to distance himself from his disapproving community in an imaginative portrayal of what that community means to him. Understanding that he has removed himself from the world of his childhood, it is now up to him to create a new world of his own on the sole basis of his artistic creation, "Now I would have to paint the street that could not be seen," (Potok, 318). His imagination becomes the creator of his artistic fame and prowess, yet also the destroyer of his previous life in Brooklyn.

Billy Pilgrim has a much different method retreating into the dark depths of his imagination, yet the basic reason remains the same -- escape from a disapproving world. For him, a survivor of one of the worst disasters in World War II, he comes home to the States to find a nation that is almost completely ignorant to the plight he was forced to face stuck in the meat lockers in Dresden. While he witnessed the fire bombings, which resulted in the death of thousands of German civilians, soldiers, and American prisoners of war, the rest of the nation never fully understood the happenings of that fateful event over seas. Rather, he came home to a nation which completely ignored that traumatic experience of his, and he was forced to use his own methods to deal with his trauma through the various facets of his imagination. America did not provide him solace or comfort for the tragic event he had just witnessed, instead his society expected him to return unscathed and throw himself back into middle class life as a practicing dentist. In fact, he never even fully acknowledged his trauma to himself until the night of his wedding anniversary when he is reminded through experiencing the sights and sounds of the barbershop quartet. So he adopts a systematic method of retreating into his own mind to deal with the intense experience which was Dresden. He travels both backwards in time into the meat locker prison as well as forwards in time to a distant planet inhabited by the Tralfamadorians. This alien race provides him the comfort and solace which he never received from his late wife and fellow Americans upon returning from the war. They help him understand the fleeting nature of life, and the necessity of death, "So it goes," (Vonnegut, 214). In this context, Vonnegut is making a statement regarding the failure of American society to truly console and comforts its people, and within the context of this failure, the imagination can provide a much needed tool to help deal with the horrors of reality. Although this concept does represent the sort of isolated connectedness seen in Potok's work My Name is Asher Lev, in the idea that the imagination can help you deal with life and life a connected existence with the world around you, yet completely isolates you with the idea that that same society can therefore deem you insane.