For all of the Tralfamadorian time travel that he experiences, Billy Pilgrim is always moving forward in time. Directly after living one instant of his life, he lives the next, even though he occasionally skips a bunch of instants by traveling either forward or backward in time. Never, however, does he go through a period where he lives one instant and then immediately lives the instant directly before it - with one exception. On his daughter's wedding night, Billy can't sleep, knowing from experience that he is about to be kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians. He gets out of bed, goes downstairs into his living room, and turns on the television - and he suddenly begins living in reverse. He isn't skipping through time, his usual method of time travel; he is moving through time at a normal speed, only backwards.
He spends this period of time reversal by watching the late movie that happens to be on television - backwards. It's about World War II, so he sees German soldiers sucking bullets and shell fragments away from U.S. airplanes, and U.S airplanes removing the destruction from a ravaged German city. When the planes get to England, they ship the weapons back to the United States, where factory workers, mostly women, dismantle them and send the materials away to be buried in the Earth. The soldiers then turn into high-schoolers, and Billy extrapolates that Hitler, along with everyone else, turns into a baby, and "all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve" (75).
When I first read this, I thought that it was a wonderful way of looking at things. This movie depicting the horrors of war and destruction could, simply by being watched in reverse, be transformed into a heartwarming story about soldiers miraculously healing each other, destroying weapons, and working together to create two perfect humans.
"But wait," I then realised. "This is the opposite of what really happened." Indeed, this wonderful story, by virtue of the fact that it is reality played in reverse, literally depicts the polar opposite of what actually happened. What actually happened, then, must therefore be entropy in action, a perfect situation getting worse and worse and worse. That's the true takeaway from this scene, and, in a way, the novel as a whole. The war was not glorious. The war was the very opposite of the perfect story told by the movie in reverse. The war consisted of mindless destruction, of people who could be using their energy to make the world a better place instead using it to destroy each other. That's what this war, and all other wars, really meant.
I believe I mentioned in your section that this vignette of the war-movie-backwards is one of my favorite moments in the novel, and a good example of what the Tralfamadorians call "deep, surprising, and beautiful." I hadn't noticed that it's a unique example of Billy's time travel manipulating his own experience of a particular moment, but you're right. Oddly, though, *his* narrative pretty much sits still during this passage--he passively watches the movie play in reverse, and it's the war narrative that really moves in the opposite direction. And it ends up being a lovely image of a world that's so painfully the opposite of our own, where everyone conspires NOT to kill each other in increasingly technologically sophisticated ways. It's one of those moments where Billy seems more than "spacey" or "weird"--he seems to have some privileged insight in his perceptions, and Vonnegut presents this as a "vision" similar to his glimpse of Adam and Eve in the golden boot, "so eager to behave decently." We see how far our world has "fallen," and Billy's simplistic "innocence" helps make this perception poignant.
ReplyDelete