(Billy) Pilgrim

DVD /film based on the novel.  My students read the novel and viewed clips of the film.

Today in my imaginative writing class (which meets at 9:30 in the morning--much too early for a night owl like me), we discussed Slaughterhouse-Five.    We've been studying myths and the students have read two works that discuss mythological heroes, works by Joseph Campbell and David Leeming.  The students have a paper due on Tuesday which will focus on Vonnegut's hero, Billy Pilgrim.   

I wanted the students to deal with a couple of issues:  I wanted them to think about how Billy Pilgrim compares and contrasts with the mythological heroes Campbell and Lemming talk about.  And I wanted them to think about the heroes they will create in order to tell their own stories.  In what ways will their heroes be like or unlike mythological heroes.  At the heart of the matter is change.  To what extent do the old stories work and how do we need to adjust stories (and heroes) to speak to our generation.  

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes,  

People aren't supposed to look back.  I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now.  The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. 

It begins like this:  

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

It ends like this: Poo-tee weet?  

The thing that impresses me the most about his passage is Vonnegut's narrator's modesty.  Like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Slaughterhouse-Five is about an author trying to make sense of the utter senselessness of war.  That we cannot capture our experience in the lofty way we envision it is inevitable.   

Billy Pilgrim is a modern hero in the sense that he undergoes the existential dilemma so many of us face:  what is the meaning of my existence?  What is the meaning of life?  In the face of the world's horror, how do I find peace.  Can I ever be happy? 

Vonnegut writes of Pilgrim and a character named Rosewater:  "They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war." Slaughterhouse-Five is a story about the fire-bombing of Dresden during WWII.   Pilgrim's solution is to re-invent himself. 

In class, we talked about the writer's job, which to re-invent myths and stories for readers today.  Vonnegut writes that Rosewater felt that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov.  

But Rosewater now believes "that isn't enough any more."  In other words, Dostoevsky wrote for his place and time.  His work contains eternal truths, yes, but can never speak to the present generation in the same way it spoke to readers in the time it was written.    So the pilgrimage of the writer is this:  to go out in search of the words, the thoughts, the deeds, the problems, the truth that makes sense in this time, in this place.   

Poo-tee-weet?