Billy Pilgrim's unstuck memory in Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse Five

Three Awards for Slaughterhouse Five

Award 1: A scrapbook for Billy Pilgrim

Billy Pilgrim is described as a character unstuck in time. His memory serves as the narrative structure of Slaughterhouse Five, a series of memories that occurs after Billy is in a plane accident. At the time of the accident, Billy is employed as an eye doctor in upstate New York. Billy has a wife, children, and comfortable life, but he is haunted by memories of his captivity during World War II, and digging out from his imprisonment in a work camp during the bombing of Dresden. Rather than finding comfort in material success and his physical survival, he is disenchanted with his current existence. He dreams as well that he is captured by aliens, who underline the principle that human beings have no free will, evidently reflecting Billy's sense of powerlessness over the actions that have shaped his life. Because Billy has been able to exert so little control over others in his past, he feels that it is impossible for human beings to change their lives, and everything is fated. Billy feels he could not change the fact he would marry woman he does not love or find attractive, for example, anymore than he could object to fighting in a war.

The scrapbook honors Billy's most significant action in the novel -- the act of remembering (and dreaming) the entire sequence of events, because without Billy's memory and strange fantasies there would be no Slaughterhouse Five. A scrapbook contains pictures and other memorabilia that cannot be changed, just like how Billy sees the past. But like memory, the order of a scrapbook can also be rearranged and reinterpreted in the present. People try to impose a rational order upon the past, and often arrange a scrapbook from past to present, but because you can open the book and be confronted with a disconnected event, opening a scrapbook demonstrates unstable nature of memory. You can also insert new photos or scraps that will change the story shown in the scrapbook.

Award 3: A trip around the world for Valencia Pilgrim

Valencia's award, of course, would require her to get a reprieve from her untimely death while visiting her husband. Valencia is one of the saddest characters in the novel. She loves her husband, even though he regards her as overweight and unattractive. She spends most of her life devoted to making a happy home and making life pleasant for her husband and children, even though her husband shares very little of his real, inner turmoil with her. She does now know how much emotional damage Billy suffered after the wartime bombing. She drowns her sorrows in overeating, and both her husband and the narrator seem to regard her as a figure of fun, rather than a fully-fledged human being.

Valencia dies on the way to visit her husband, after Billy is in the plane crash that precipitates the flurry of memories that make up the novel. Her death, like Billy's brain injury, is the result of a random accident, poisoning by carbon monoxide, but also, one could argue, it symbolizes how she has sacrificed everything for others. Billy asked her to marry him, she did not force him to do so, although to Billy Pilgrim, his action feels forced in his mind because has never found her attractive. Then, Valencia's son Robert goes off to war and her daughter Barbara comes into conflict with an apparently insane Billy, when he begins to talk about the aliens he has seen. Valencia's children do not even learn from her husband's wartime experience, or emulate their mother's love for Billy.

Valencia's tragedy is not that she is unloved, but that her life has been so circumscribed by her role as a wife and mother, and by her perceived unattractiveness, which causes her to overeat even more. A trip around the world would have given her experience and self-esteem. She could have become a better listener and confidant of her husband, and more importantly gained a sense of respect for herself that would have encouraged her to give up over-eating, and to pursue her own interests in life.