which even disturbs Billy’susually normal outward appearance, shows how deeply Billy has buried hisDresden memories.
I think this also shows just how terrifying they must have been and it makes me wonder how victims of wars cope. How do they gain the courage and strength to eventually meet these memories head on?
Testimonyhasbothaprivatedimension,whichisconfessionalandspiritual,andapublicaspect,whichispoliticalandjudicial.Theuseofthewordtestimonylinksbothmeanings,givinganewandlargerdimensiontothepatient’sindividualexperience.
In this book we don't just get the raw happenings. Readers get to experience what it felt like before and after, got to go through denial and avoidance with the characters. After reading this article I definitely agree that this book is a written struggle of Vonnegut and Billy attempting to deal with PTSD.
Vonnegut tries not to face his suppressedmemories directly but to get to the core by slowly uncovering layer after layer.The novel reflects this process of narrowing in on himself through the twotrauma stories
Even if you don't like the book I think you have to admire Vonnegut for taking so much of him time to work through the things he's seen. It's an incredibly strong and brave feat.
Before they can be shared with others, they first have tobe translated into language—a task that, difficult in itself, is complicated byavoidance and denial
To go back to my post from earlier,we don't even have the language to go about speaking of such things. No one wan't to talk about what they saw which forces those struggling to suffer alone.
t is framed by thatof the narrator, who is a fictionalized version of Vonnegut himself. Althoughseparated from Billy’s story, some of the “linking devices” (Klinkowitz 78) foundthere, the Tralfamadorian “so it goes,” the smell of “mustard gas and roses
When this line was mentioned I actually though that Vonnegut was having some kind of interaction with billy. As readers we are told he often calls old war buddies up at night and I always though that when billy picked up the phone it was Vonnegut on the other side. However I like this authors idea of these repeating symbols coming to represent how Billy and Vonnegut are going through the same sort of post-war torture.
psychic numbing”(115) or “psychic closing-off”
He's seen so many horrors that anything in regular life feels like nothing at all. It's sad to imagine being so numb to the world around you. It's even worse to think that he's like this because he had no other way to deal with all the emotions he was feeling so he just shut down :(
Traumatic experiences have been described for centuries, but PTSDhas only been recognized as an independent psychiatric classification since itsinclusion in the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of MentalDisorders (DSM).
Assuming that Billy has PTSD (i'm not sure if I agree with that claim yet) it is really interesting when you consider the year in which the book was written. The book published in 1969, and in process for 20 years prior, and then PTSD become an official disorder only in 1980! Vonnegut is unknowingly writing about a character who is experiencing this disorder. Makes you wonder if Vonnegut himself felt the same things! It's heart breaking to imagine a man trying to deal with PTSD without even knowing he has it.
“(to call it that)”
There is clearly doubt even in professionals. As readers we try and make sense of things we do not understand. It is not logical to believe Billy Pilgrim went to Tralfamador so to make it logical we are trying to force a diagnosis of insanity. Forced diagnosis' usually lead to incorrect ones.
“I came home in 1945, started writing about it, and wrote about it,and wrote about it, and WROTE ABOUT IT”
Vonnegut has difficulty expressing the levels of destruction and cruelty that he witnesses. As people we lack the language to describe these terrors, and we are often left with only silence. In a way this is how Vonnegut uses "poo-tee-weet" ; when there are no words to help one comprehend whats happened, and when the magnitude of cruelty grows too great, the only thing thats left is human silence and singing birds.