I found the quote " 'May I ask you a simple question?' 'Of course.' 'Why is it you never mentioned any of this before the airplane crash?' 'I didn't think the time was ripe'". In this conversation, exchanged between Billy and his daughter, I found myself wondering if Billy truly was sane. While it is entirely possible, at least within the realm of fiction, that he went traveling to Tralfamadore, and became unstuck in time, it is also entirely possible that he was simply an unfortunate man, who suffered in the war, and damaged his brain in an airplane crash, causing him to believe that he was a traveler outside of all conventional understanding of time. The best example which highlights this possibility is when Billy is in New York, when he first starts to talk about his experience. before he says anything to anyone, he visits a bookstore. In this bookstore is a novel by Kilgore Trout, which is about “An earthling man and woman, who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.” Almost immediately after seeing this book, he sees the magazine What really happened to Montana Wildhack?. The way that this information is presented makes it seem likely that this is all happening inside his head, but, in the words of Albus Dumbledore, why should that mean that it isn’t real? Even if Billy is only imagining the time travel, and isn’t truly visiting other moments in his life, what is the difference between if he is truly traveling through time, or just imagining it? My group and I discussed these possibilities, and came to the conclusion that there was no conclusion. We believe that the point was purposefully left vague, and is meant to provoke thought. Throughout Billy's 'episodes', he almost exclusively travels to the war, with a few outlying moments. "he first came unstuck in time in 1944, long before his trip to Tralfamadore...Billy first became unstuck when World War Two was in progress." His trips seem to be primarily between the war and his life as an optometrist. It seems to me that, due to the plane crash and his wartime experiences, Billy's time travel is the result of someone whose mind has been damaged trying to make sense of the world around him. He can't explain why people die, and rationalizes it with the idea that they're not really dead at all - Just living in different moments in time. As Tim noted, it is entirely possible that Billy is aware of what is going on, and requires the thought of Tralfamadore as a sort of solace, so that he doesn’t feel miserable about all the death that he witnessed during the war. This ties in well to Tim’s observation of the motif of religion, and Karina’s observation of the phrase ‘so it goes’ as a sort of consolation. Billy’s belief in Tralfamadore is almost exactly the same as any religion around the world - a belief in an elevated class of beings, and a way of what is essentially stopping death. Billy believes in Tralfamadore and time travel for the same reason that many people turn to religion - he desires it, needs it, to reconcile the death that he has lived through.
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