Time is such an interesting concept, and Slaughterhouse-Five definitely shows that. The whole book is written out of order, but it has an almost linear sense to it, and you come away with a feeling of completeness. It's almost like how the Tralfamadorian novels are written. You have these series of vignettes, little passages and moments separated by dots, and sometimes the moments connect and sometimes they don't. But when you look at all the moments from above, after completion of the novel, you really see the depth and, as the Tralfamadorians describe, "an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep" (Vonnegut 112).
I think the Tralfamadorian idea of time is really cool and I wish I could see in four dimensions so that I could really experience Tralfamadorian time. It's intriguing, especially since it's so hard to think of time in such a manner. We're so used to thinking of time as a strict progeression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.
Sorry. Doctor Who reference. Couldn't resist.
But anyways, it actually is kind of hard to think of time in any other way but linear since we can't, or at least can't seem to, experience it any other way. Like, the thing that most attracts me to the Tralfamadorian way of viewing time is the whole "so it goes" thing; the idea that nobody is ever truly dead. You're always living because you have all the moments before your death. So what is death even? Just the end of the body. The person still exists, has always existed, and will always exist. And that just seems so beautiful to me. But why is it so beautiful? Because from my linear perspective, a death really is the end of a person. True, there are memories, but memories are only in your mind and you can't experience them as moments like the Tralfamadorians can. So this whole idea of basically eternal life just seems so out there and so wonderful, though to the Tralfamadorians it wouldn't be anything special at all. It's just how things are.
I do have this feeling, though, that the Tralfamadorian idea of time is actually the correct one. I have no idea what science is saying right now, but I just feel like time can't be linear. I feel like time is just existing, that is, everything that ever happened, is happening, and ever will happen is happening right now. All of history, all at once. It's just, we can't perceive it. There are some sort of barriers, and I suppose that comes from our lack of a fourth dimension sense. But I just feel like things can't just happen and then be done. That makes it sound like time dies. I dunno. I'm sort of rambling now, but I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the Tralfamadorian idea of time is wonderful, and most likely correct, but it's so hard for us to think about time in that way because of our own linear bias.
And Vonnegut anticipates much of this discussion in the novel itself: whether or not the Trafalm. way is the "right one," the idea is built into the novel that our perception is literally limited by our physiognomy--this other dimension is *invisible* to us. The main objection to the idea that all moments exist together simultaneously is that our experience doesn't bear this out: memories persist, and people and times are "alive" in them, but not *quite* in the way they are for Billy, where he continues to reinhabit them again and again. It's that *access* that's the problem--how comforting is the idea that all moments exist in perpetuity if we have no access to them?
ReplyDelete(These are the kinds of weird questions one is compelled to ask when reading this novel!)