Before I'm completely done with talking about Slaughterhouse Five, I wanted to revisit an interesting point that came up in the panel presentations yesterday. During the presentation, the point that Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack were like Adam and Eve and planet Tralfamadore was like the Garden of Eden came up. I thought this was quite the fitting comparison because Billy and Montana were the first humans on Tralfamadore just like Adam and Eve were the first humans on Earth. Billy and Montana become like Adam and Eve to start the human race over again. Billy, like Adam, is not ashamed of his nakedness and is also given Montana after she is kidnapped kind of like God creating Eve for Adam to have a mate.
I feel like Billy Pilgrim is a Christ-like character in the regard that he was an innocent individual who was tainted by society and the evils of humanity. This makes his character even more useful because more people can read Slaughterhouse Five and follow his story. I can't really think of any other significance in the comparisons to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden but whatever other underlying meanings there are, I'm sure they're meant to be there. Vonnegut makes them too obvious for them to be just a mere coincidence.
Can Billy be both Christ AND Adam? Is there a statutory limit on biblical analogies?
ReplyDeleteIf the Trafalm. zoo creates a kind of "Eden" environment, of course that positions the aliens themselves as "God"--controlling daylight and darkness, providing a Sears-supplied "garden" environment, and providing a kind of wisdom about the true, eternal nature of life that gives peace and teaches that there is no true death. The parallels are pretty strong. And despite their respective pasts on earth, as members of a (corrupting) society, Billy and Montana are indeed returned to a state of like-innocence. Even the most traumatic personal experience Billy could possibly narrate is presented on Trafalmadore as "telling a story" to Montana--almost a fable from a distant time and place. There's a kind of Edenic innocence in the way he tells the story with such detachment.