Chapter 7- Go to your happy place...

      Due to his time travels, Billy Pilgrim already knows that the plane he chartered to a convention in Montreal will crash and that everyone except himself and the copilot will perish. Therefore, minutes before the plane was to meet its demise, Billy Pilgrim "closed his eyes, traveled in time back to 1944" (156). Since my summer has been mainly consumed with summer work and Friends reruns, I thought of an episode that I had recently watched. In this episode, Phoebe tells Chandler to go to his happy place after breaking up with his girlfriend. I couldn't help but relate Billy Pilgrim to Phoebe's advice because he unknowingly followed it. Often, people block out bad memories or current inopportune situations by thinking "happy thoughts". This is a defense mechanism that can be used to focus on good memories rather than unfortunate occurances. Billy Pilgrim employs this coping method in order to escape the grim reality of the plane crash.

Chapter 7- Simile

     While being rescued at the airplane crash site in chapter seven, Billy Pilgrim is aided by Austrian ski instructors. To Billy Pilgrim, "they looked like golliwogs" (156) with their black masks and red topknots. I did not understand this simile at first since I had never heard of a golliwog. According to Wikipedia, golliwogs were black rag dolls that became popular after World War II. They were considered to be toys for little boys because they were usually male. These dolls are considered by many to be a cultural tradition to be preserved; however, others believe that the dolls promote racism. Now, these dolls are rare and no longer mass produced as children's toys. Even Billy Pilgrim seems to believe that golliwogs have a negative connotation, for he says that the ski instructors were "like white people pretending to be black for the laughs they could get"(156). This shows that just twenty five years after WWII people found golliwogs rather offensive.

Chapter 6- Revenge!

     Paul Lazzaro sought revenge upon anyone who ever wronged him including animals. For instance, in order to punish a dog who had bitten him, Paul fed the dog a steak filled with sharp, pernicious peices of a clock spring which killed the defenseless animal. After recapitulating this story to Billy Pilgrim and Edgar Derby, Lazzaro said, "Anybody ever ask you what the sweetest thing in life is...it's revenge."(139).  Similarly, Paul Lazzaro orchestrated Billy Pilgrim's death, as I discussed in my previous post. This vengeful character reminded me of the main character, Amy Dunne, in a novel that I just enjoyed called Gone Girl, written by Gillian Flynn. Amy wanted to penalize her husband, Nick, for not appreciating her as a husband should; therefore, she staged her own murder and framed Nick. At first glance, Lazzaro and Dunne do not appear to be very similar, but the way in which Amy calculated her revenge mirrors Lazzaro's. Neither of the two acted immediately on their victims. Paul waited years to kill Billy, just as Amy carefully contrived to tear apart her husband for an entire year. These characters illustrate the fact that revenge often drives people to commit despicable crimes.

Chapter 6- Eulogy

Usually, a eulogy is about someone who has recently died; therefore, it is obviously orated by someone other than the deceased. However, Billy Pilgrim delivers his own eulogy since "as a time-traveler he has seen his own death many times"(141). He is certain that his death will be at the hands of Paul Lazzaro who still demands to ascertain revenge for the death of Roland Weary. Also, Billy Pilgrim knows that he will die on February 13, 1976. On this day, he is to address a crowd while in Chicago and discuss his time traveling expeditions. While in the middle of his speech, Billy predicts that he will die within the hour and jokes about it by saying, "'It is high time I was dead.'"(142). Shocked, the crowd protests, but Billy Pilgrim assures them that he embraces death for that was the message of his speech. This eulogy is rather optimistic since Billy does not condemn his own death. After sending his police protection home, Billy Pilgrim is shot by a laser gun which results in his death. "So it goes."

Chapter 5- Billy Pilgrim and the pilgrims

                  

While reading the near fifty pages of chapter five, I made a significant connection between Billy Pilgrim's last name and the first settlers of America, also named pilgrims. Upon reading the comment made by Billy's mother, "'The Pilgrims are coming up in the world.'"(119), I recognized the fact that Vonnegut may have used the name "Pilgrim" to allude to the pilgrims. Just as Billy is "coming up in the world" through his occupation, the pilgrims came up in the world by establishing colonies in America. Additionally, Billy Pilgrim can be similarly be described as a trailblazer because of his journeys to Tralfamadore. This symbolism is deepened since Billy is the first human to speak of his sojourn to the alien world just as the pilgrims were some of the first to trek to America which was considered an alien world during that time period. Therefore, the name "Pilgrim" is more than a mere coincidence.

Chapter 5- Anthropomorphism (Personification)

   While in the hospital for veterans three years after the war, Billy Pilgrim notices a bottle of water on his bedside table. The personification's inception is "The water was dead. So it goes."(101). Since water cannot literally die, the dead water is used to illustrate the fact that Billy feels dead while in the hospital although he is not actually deceased. This also represent Billy's outlook on life since "Billy didn't really like life at all"(102). Moreover, the water is further described in detail; "Air was trying to get out of that dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.". Because bubbles can neither be physically weak nor physically climb, they represent Billy Pilgrim's feelings of entrapment and helplessness. Hopefully, these feelings of despair dissipate throughout the novel.

Chapter 4- Wonderland or Tralfamadore?!

     Before journeying to Tralfamadore, Billy Pilgirm encounters a bottle of champagne. "'Drink me,' it seemed to say."(73). This small little command reminded me of Alice and Wonderland. As I thought about it further, I realized that Alice and Billy possessed some similarities. Both were traveling to mystical places titled Wonderland and Tralfamadore, respectively. Additionally, upon their returns, no one believed that they had actually traveled to such unbelievable locations. Also, the bottles of shrinking and growing potions that Alice imbibed allowed her passage into Wonderland through a door. By drinking the champagne, Billy was also whisked away to Tralfamadore although the champagne did not actually result in his journey. Even though the allusion is rather indirect, Vonnegut was comparing Billy and Alice through the use of the champagne.