Billy Pilgrim Reaches Nirvana

"The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eye hole through which he could look, and welded to that eye hole were six feet of pipe."

The Tralfamadorians believe that Billy is sadly limited by his inability to see that all of time is always occurring and that time itself is not at all linear. But Billy has a much better understanding of the Tralfamadorian idea of time. He cannot see all of time at the same time, but he has become unstuck in time, allowing him to understand that the order of events does not matter. This limited understanding seems to us almost like enlightenment (as in Buddhist enlightenment), even though it is not nearly as sophisticated as the Tralfamadorian viewpoint.

Englightment is a contested term; no one really seems to understand what it means. Western culture has adopted the idea of Buddhist enlightenment to use it in self-help books, but there is a very deep religious tradition based on it in both Buddhism and Christianity. The Buddhist idea of enlightenment seems more in line with Billy's attitudes.So what is Buddhist enlightenment? There are multiple terms for enlightenment that come from the various branches of Buddhism in different regions.

Kensho--"seeing one's true essence".
Bodhi--"to have woken up and understood".
Samyaksambodhi--"highest perfect awakening".
Satori--"comprehension, understanding".

Buddha's enlightenment involved three knowledges. He understood his past lives, how karma and reincarnation worked, and the four noble truths (the truth of suffereing, the orgin of suffereing, how to stop suffering, and the truth behind following that path). In this way, he "attained supreme security from bondage". It has been described as an awakening to some larger reality that most of us never understand.

Billy Pilgrim seems to have reached enlightenment in many ways. He has not escaped suffering so much as accepted and thus escaped it. Billy was a prisoner of war. He was in Dresden. Later, he was in a plane crash and his wife died in the same week. He has had his share of suffering, and he has lived through it. He does not let the sadness take him over on a daily basis; when it does surface, he cannot understand what it is about.For example, it takes him a long time to understand why the barbershop quartet affects him so strongly. "Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. he had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow agonized experiments with chords...Billy had powerfully psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled wit the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack" (173). The effects of his suffering have made their mark on him, but he worked through it, and as a result of becoming unstuck in time he seems to have reached a strange serenity.

Billy accepts everything. For example, when his father throws him into the pool, he does not attempt to paw his way to the surface: "...he was at the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He lost conciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that" (44).When he was being shot at, he stood there and gave the sniper another chance. He lets his daughter make him feel like a child by patronizing him without getting upset. Everything just seems to drift by him, and he looks at it, understands that it has to happen that way because the moment is structured that way, and lets it go. In fact, this attitude is similar to the attitude that you are supposed to try to adopt when meditating, a practice that is intimately connected to enlightenment. When thoughts come into your head, you are supposed to let them pass you by without judging them, in an attempt to eventually become almost thoughtless. It seems that maybe Billy is living in a constant state of meditation., reaching a state of uninvolved presence that allows him to view the world more calmly.

Wayne and Sinatra in Slaughterhouse-Five?

I was reading through an interview with Kurt Vonnegut in the online version of the Paris Review (the link is at the bottom) and saw that Vonnegut had originally intended to tell his story as "a classy adventure". He really did intend to create a book that would be have roles for Frank Sinatra and John Wayne at the beginning of the writing process:

Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney, who jumped into print at that time; I didn't know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called Air Gunner. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that...Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden, saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, By God, I saw something after all! I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

It surprised me that Vonnegut actually thought that he would right the typical war novel; it wasn't really even his intention to write an antiwar novel when he began. The first chapter had not given me that impression at all. I was also surprised that his conversation with Mary O'hare was true. The first chapter is Vonnegut speaking about his experience, but I didn't realize the extent to which he is present. Even the name Mary O'Hare is the same. Another comment interested me as well, all about his experience in the war. When the interviewer asked "What did you do when you got to the front?", he answered, "I imitated various war movies I’d seen."
These two statements made me realize that Slaughterhouse-Five would have been very different if Vonnegut had written it earlier on, just after he had come out of the war. Most of the war books and movies of the time starred soldiers who were patriotic, brave, masculine, and eager to fight on the front lines for their countries (and usually featuring large weapons to demonstrate the power of the United States and the other Allies). If Vonnegut had written Slaughterhouse-Five while he was caught up in the feeling of success of the postwar years, I think he might have written it like a war movie. I wouldn't want to say that he wasn't deeply affected and disturbed by the war at that time; he probably was--I think it would be hard to come back from the war without being kind of messed up. But he was still very young when he came back, and did not, even according to him, fully understand the gravity of what he had witnessed in Dresden.

When the city was demolished I had no idea of the scale of the thing . . . Whether this was what Bremen looked like or Hamburg, Coventry . . . I’d never seen Coventry, so I had no scale except for what I’d seen in movies.

Vonnegut waited all the way until 1968-1969 to write Slaughterhouse-Five. This was right before the Vietnam war, and there was a lot of anti-war protesting at the time which also might have influenced him to write about his experiences from an anti-war perspective. As an older adult, he better understood how young he was when he went to war, especially after he talked to Mary O'Hare. 

She freed me to write about what infants we really were: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that that was a problem. 

I don't that Vonnegut could have seen that if he was writing the book in his twenties, because people cannot see how naive and young they are--they can only look back and realize how little they knew and understood in the past. We would undoubtedly be reading a very different book if Vonnegut had written Slaughterhouse-Five in the forties; in fact, I don't think we would be reading it, because it would most likely be less controversial and less creative in its approach.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3605/the-art-of-fiction-no-64-kurt-vonnegut