We Think by Feeling': On the Power of Storytelling to Repair Traumatized Human Narratives, with Examples from People Living, Dead, and Fictional

Cruz 1 Jason Cruz Senior Project Submission Supervisor: Dr. Joshua Rust Submitted 5 December 2016 “We think by feeling”: On the power of storytelling to repair traumatized human narratives, with examples from people living, dead, and fictional Abstract In this essay I argue that people’s lives themselves are narratives, building from Marya Schechtman’s narrative self-constitution view. I then argue that narratives are emotional cadences driven by their events, and that the emotional resonance of life events make up our senses of who we are and how we should live. Trauma, by diminishing one’s capacity to feel new emotions and forcing one to relive the inciting events, disrupts one’s narrative self-constitution. Telling the story of our trauma brings us back into contact with narratives and enables us to re-incorporate our traumatic experiences into our narrative self-constitutions. In the end I argue that Kurt Vonnegut managed his World War II trauma by writing about Slaughterhouse-Five, which expresses trauma victims’ experiences. Cruz 2 I am hard pressed to imagine a more distinctly human activity than storytelling. Our species’ survival has depended on stories for millennia. We tell children stories as soon as they can comprehend the words and images involved. Our cultural narratives create societal identities, shape our views of the world, and imbue us with shared loves, fears, and dreams. At a certain point we see the world through stories. Not only the events playing out around us and in our own lives but the causal chain of the material world’s development. People use stories to explain, argue, inform, and attack. Where there are people, there are stories being told and experienced. I believe that the stories of our lives define who we are, what we care about, how we think, feel, and behave. This essay reflects that belief and aims to explain how we constitute ourselves as narratives and what makes a narrative. Following that I will analyze trauma, which threatens people’s power to narrativize the events of their lives. I then offer a way to use storytelling as a healing mechanism in the face of trauma, concluding with the usage of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five as a case study of that very thing. Throughout I will turn to examples I believe clarify the concepts I discuss. If I succeed, you the reader should come away a tiny bit wiser about yourself, those around you, some people who do not exist, and a deceased Indiana native’s attempt to fill the city-sized hole in his story. Unless, of course, you already know how this story goes. Living Stories To begin constructing my argument I will describe and defend a picture of personhood, or what it is like to be a conscious, reflexive person. University of Illinois-Chicago professor Marya Schechtman argues for what she calls the “narrative self-constitution” view of human experience in her paper “Stories, Lives, and Basic Survival: A Refinement and Defense of the Cruz 3 Narrative View.” The narrative self-constitution view holds that “we constitute ourselves as persons by forming a narrative self-conception according to which we experience and organize our lives” (Schechtman 162). This narrative conception provides unity and emotional resonance to the different events of our lives. By viewing my own personhood as a narrative, “what happens to me is not interpreted as an isolated incident, but as part of an ongoing story” (162). Schechtman and I agree that the narrative self-constitution view explains how people view their lives and that this adds value for them. Schechtman writes that the “difference between the way someone experiences a period of intensely hard work when she knows that once the project is off her desk her promotion is assured and she can leave on vacation, and the way she experiences it if it is part of a life of grindingly difficult labor with no foreseeable relief” illustrates the way understanding the present moment as connected to a larger story changes our reaction to it (162). This woman’s narrative self-constitution enables her to persevere through the drudgery needed to reach her goals. Her life story makes a bad situation better by placing it in the context of a greater narrative arc. Similarly, if the event connects to a laborious life it becomes either a regretful continuation of an unfortunate status quo or, potentially, the motivation to fight for a better life. Schechtman provides two constraints someone must comply with in order to hold oneself as a person: the reality and articulation constraints. The reality constraint requires that one’s narrative conform to the real, material world. The articulation constraint mandates that people be able to express their narratives upon request, or “at least to recognize the legitimacy of certain questions” about their lives, motivations, and actions (163). When one cannot articulate their personal narrative she cannot grasp the ways her life’s events impact each other. She cannot intelligibly render her choices or affect beyond the impulses of a given moment. This brings her Cruz 4 to a view of herself which does not exist elsewhen besides the present time and fails to account for her past and present. One’s narrative self-constitution tightly links the past, present, and future. Due to narrativity, “the experienced past and anticipated future must condition the character and significance of present experiences and action” (162). The past implicates and colors the present moment. Responsible action can only be taken with an understanding of the significance of prior events. Recognizing that the future will be limited and understood through the frames of its own past leads us to consider the consequences of our current moment. F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates recognition of the tight connection between the present and future in his famous novel The Great Gatsby. As Jay Gatsby contemplates kissing Daisy Buchanan for the first time he examines the effect that choice would have on the rest of his life’s story: Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (Fitzgerald 110) Cruz 5 Gatsby recognizes the story of his life will be forever changed if he kisses Daisy. He understands that the path he wishes to embark upon, up the social ladder into the wealthy class he spent his entire life attempting to join, requires solitude. To kiss Daisy and forever entwine his life with hers will require sacrifice and reorienting himself to a new future. Understanding his narrative constitution and how the present will impact his future, Gatsby decides to embrace the path of romance and forever alters his story. In the novel’s present day, that kiss takes on overwhelming emotional significance to Gatsby. He views it as the beginning of the tragic path he has spent every moment since the kiss enduring. Romancing Daisy implicated Gatsby’s future and, with time, became the start to a heart wrenching past. The concept of narrative self-constitutions requires an understanding of what constitutes narratives. In the next section I will explicate and argue for a view of narrative which focuses not on the details of events, but their emotional resonance. Movements from one emotion to another, catalyzed by the events of our lives, form the links between past, present, and future which create our narrative self-constitutions. Emotional Storytelling To say more about the way in which narrative self-constitutions develop, I will further analyze narrativity itself. Earlier I described a link which connects and colors our views of the past, present, and future. The link comes from our emotional responses to events. What may have otherwise been a simple kiss became one of the most important moments in Gatsby’s life story when felt as a turning point. This insertion of meaning into our lives happens not only on the cerebral, linguistic level. Narrative self-constitutions also render our life events affectively meaningful. Cruz 6 Before explaining that link it is important to explain what narratives are and what they are not. Noël Carroll, a professor of philosophy in the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, usefully distinguishes between the concept of narrative and that of an annal. An annal is a series of events told but “is not a full-blooded narrative. [However] it is not altogether without temporal order … we should call annals members of the class of story forms, where story forms are any sort of temporally ordered discourse” (Carroll 121). A temporally ordered discourse in which the events under examination are “combined with a unified subject,” Carroll dubs a chronicle (121). Neither annals nor chronicles are narratives because they both miss a fundamental “connection among the events alluded to1” (123). The internal logic of our humanity makes actual storytelling familiar and sought out. We live through a narrative and hungrily devour the narratives of others, real or fictional. Chronicles and annals do not cut it. The seeming randomness of their events defies what J. David Velleman, citing Aristotle, describes as the explanation of a plot “which requires the portrayed events to follow one another ‘by necessity or probability’” (1). A natural human reaction to such randomness is the same one we experience when we see “senseless” or “bizarre” news stories: why did this happen? Put another way, the question is what caused this? When discussing proper narratives, those questions fail to arise because emotional connections render the events intelligible. Connections have been made obvious and causes observable. That special, intuitive link between events constitutes their relationship as a narrative. Without this link, we can easily recognize the failure to story. If I tell you “Samori walks to the store, later sees a friend, and at night goes to bed” you would wonder why I bothered relaying such information to you and certainly not feel that I had just told you a story. 1 Carroll goes on to explain what tight connection he believes makes a narrative. Elaborating on that further here is unnecessary for my purposes. Cruz 7 You would be searching for some kind of linkage between the events I described and trying to decipher what I attempted to say by telling them to you. Emotions are often labeled messy and obfuscating when trying to get the facts of a particular moment. In narratives, emotions function as explanatory markers. Velleman argues that the fundamental nature of narratives is that they complete emotional cadences through their events in his paper “Narrative Explanation.” He argues that the explanatory strength of a story qua narrative comes from its emotional “way of organizing events into an intelligible whole” (Velleman 1). The difference between annals and narratives becomes clear here. Timelines render events knowable; stories render them understandable. Stories structure the events into a deeper logic which undergirds human understanding by providing the person experiencing (living through or witnessing or hearing or reading) the narrative with an emotionally intelligible sense of how and why the events came to pass in the way they did. That understanding comes from the sequencing of emotions. The emotional element of a series of events creates its narrativity. A story starts with “circumstances that initiate some affect, or sequence of affects, and it ends when that emotional sequence is in some way brought to a close” (Velleman 14). The simplest of narratives meet these criteria and can be understood because of their affective patterns. To use a real world instance of an example Velleman describes, the case of OJ Simpson’s 1996 acquittal on two charges of murder, which outraged many and is now widely considered a miscarriage of justice, was seen to be put right when Simpson was sentenced to 33 years imprisonment on kidnapping charges, pleasing the public and fulfilling an emotional cadence by completing the expectation of justice served. The fact that Simpson’s guilty verdict came 13 years to the date of his acquittal, completely coincidental, provides a neat resolution to the sense of injustice. As Velleman writes, “when a murder is Cruz 8 followed by a fitting comeuppance, we feel indignation gratified. Although these events follow no causal sequence, they provide an emotional resolution, and so they have a meaning for the audience” (6). Despite the initiating murder, the final sense of justice overcomes the preceding disgust and sadness. Whatever emotion “resolves a narrative cadence tends to subsume the emotions that preceded it,” which is why we often seek out happy endings, especially after barbarism and sorrow (19). Happy endings still bring us a sense of joy, however dark the days leading to it. Since it would render almost all fiction impossible to understand, it should be obvious that it is unnecessary to be familiar with a narrative’s events to grasp its emotions. The ability to make a narrative out of episodes which would otherwise be mere chronicles or annals is “due to the possibility of finding something they might mean … in emotional terms. Any sequence of events, no matter how improbable, can provide material for storytelling if it completes an emotional cadence” (6). The particular events themselves do not matter in qualifying as a narrative, for “so long as we feel an anxiety relieved or a hope dashed, we have the sense of hearing a story, even if we have no idea why events took the relevant turn,” meaning that sheer accident, surprise fate, and coincidences can be narrative events (7). Hence stories can be told where brave, kind characters are rewarded justly by happenstance even though the people they helped remain ungrateful. Emotional cadences enable us to understand stories because these same cadences form the bedrock for our worldviews and self-constitutions. While events may be entirely foreign to us, the emotional underpinnings resonate with other stories we know or have lived. Velleman quotes Roger Schank as saying “‘storytelling and understanding are functionally the same thing’” because “we understand things by assimilating them to what is familiar … we understand Cruz 9 new experiences, for example, by assimilating them to past experiences stored in memory” (7). Our database of stories and their emotional tracks become tools in explaining, experiencing, and grasping new information and events. We readily speak in this way, using analogies to highlight the similarities between stories. One might describe her struggle to escape her dreary home life as “Star Wars if Luke had to shovel snow instead of farm moisture” and, given the right audience, easily convey a point about her upbringing. Our memories are coded into our embodied selves. Velleman points out that stories become coded in “experiential, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic memory—as we might say, in the muscle memory of the heart” (19). Our bodies react to recognition of certain emotional cadences and the stories which express them, visible in the somatic symptoms of trauma victims. The emotional and physical feelings of narratives remain with us after they end. They build a web of connectivity and reference that enables us to explore new stories without feeling alien to them. Knowing this it becomes clear that “the audience of a story understands the narrated events, first, because it knows how they feel” (19). Now I will discuss the way that we move through emotional cadences. Generally speaking, narratives lead to closure. Their emotional cadences typically resolve, though many fiction authors of the past century have intentionally frustrated such expectations. The resolution of emotions drives us from feeling to feeling, action to action. We cannot stay in one affect forever. Emotions triggered by events begin our cadences, and each emotion exhibits a “characteristic pattern of decay and extinction” which moves us towards its resolution (Velleman 14). As our personal narratives unfold and we engage the multitudinous adventures which make up life, emotions fade or others overtake them. Rarely do we find one who enjoys her entire life affectively pleased. Aggravations or troubles subsume her happiness, leading her to behavior to Cruz 10 bring those emotions to resolution and move into another period of happiness. Emotions give way to whatever has been aroused by events in one’s life. This is not to say we cannot feel multiple emotions at once, or that an emotion may not return to the fore. A given emotion need not completely preclude others. Mixtures of emotions can rise and fall together. Our narrative self-constitutions are built on these patterns and sequences. We experience an emotion, it colors our worldviews and future plans, we act upon these effects, and experiencing the resulting emotion. Emotional cadences are the connection between past, present, and future in our narrative self-constitutions. The past implicates the future because the emotional reactions we take from past events shape our new options and how we feel about them. The connection we feel between events gone by and those undergone today is that of moving from one emotional suite to another. The emotions of sadness and anger felt following a poor string of high school experiences lead us to act in ways which make us feel happy and excited for our daily lives, such as moving away from our hometowns. We recognize the legitimacy of our emotional states as coming from the events we experience. This means recognizing our present feelings and considering the future based upon them. If we feel homesick, we either return home or try to create a new one. If one feels jubilant after the birth of a child we try and protect them and that joy, making sacrifices which pay for themselves in the love one feels. Our hopes for the future color the way we perceive the present. Recall the hard working woman Schechtman described. When she goes through the emotional drudgery of her employment seeking a gainful promotion, she considers and expects a fortuitous outcome from her hard work. If the woman does her job well and is not promoted she will be furious. Her life Cruz 11 zigs where she predicted a zag. Suddenly she feels incredibly upset, and she no longer feels good about her hard work. It was sacrificial, worthy, perhaps even pleasant. Now it is wasteful, idiotic, and disdainful. She will avoid repeating the mistake because she feels the pain of it. Her narrative self-constitution will now incorporate this downturn and she will imagine new potential futures. The outcomes she will choose will attempt to resolve the uncertainty and sadness brought up by the dissipation of her expectations. Unfortunately, that new story may be one forced upon a person by way of trauma. Trauma inflicted upon someone has the power to disrupt, distort, and halt one’s narrative self-constitution. A traumatic past implicates the present moment by pushing the living person away from their own history, making her work through the incident’s aftermath while breaking her narrative apart. Trauma and Its Aftermath Here I will define trauma. Trauma marks a departure from the ordinary experiences a person goes through. Traumatic events abruptly disrupt the victim’s physical, mental, or emotional selves. Cases such as severe bodily injury or seeing a loved one die represent cases we readily identify. Trauma is not limited to closeness with death. With enough intensity and effect on the subject, anything could be traumatic. Old Dominion philosopher MaryCatherine McDonald argues that “disruptive loss: the loss of ability, the loss of motion, the sudden cessation of normalcy, the loss of coherence, the shattering of beliefs” cause trauma (1). Traumatic events assault a person’s totality and leave lasting damage on the psyche and body. Traumatic incidents compromise one’s subjective integrity. Trauma disrupts the victim’s narrative self-constitution. Part of what makes an incident traumatic is the heightened rush of severe negative emotions which challenge one’s ability to Cruz 12 experience and resolve an emotional cadence. Trauma falls outside the quotidian range of emotions a person feels. Writing about Vietnam War veterans and comparing their experiences with those described in The Iliad, psychiatrist Jonathan Shay argues that for the person hurtling through traumatic events “words such as terror, rage, and grief do not do justice to the merging of powerful feelings in this hyperaroused state2” (173). The mixture of negative emotions cannot be easily broken apart or understood. The power of these extreme, often violent, feelings ruptures a person’s usual emotional boundaries. It leaves the person’s narrative disjointed. Rather than emotional resonance imbuing intelligible meaning, a traumatic event has “affect only, not meaning. It produces emotions—terror, fear, shock … Only the sensation sector of the brain— the amygdala— is active during the trauma” (Kaplan 34). Trauma “disrupts the ability of the [victim] to synthesize, categorize, and attach meaning to events,” all crucial in comprehending events and building emotional responses into understanding (McDonald 1). Victims cannot assimilate the emotional barrage into their narrative self-constitutions. Trauma represents a direct threat to our narrative self-constitutions and therefore our subjectivity. Trauma’s effects stick around. Narrative understanding comes from the changing and resolution of emotions. Trauma prevents the individual from moving on and seeing the cause as something which happened in the past, another scene in their unfolding narrative. Instead trauma is “intrusive, tricking the body into thinking that the threat is actual and current rather than remembered and past,” leaving survivors open to constant revictimization from within their own minds and bodies (McDonald 2). By forcing the victim into a negative affective extreme and keeping her there, trauma undermines narrative capabilities. Since “the event evades meaning and, in turn, meaning making,” crafting a sensible narrative out of it stands unapproachable 2 Emphasis Shay’s Cruz 13 (Wicks 329). Trauma refuses narrativization. The victim is locked into a set of extraordinary emotions which cannot be formed into a cadence, do not resolve, do not decay, only burden, only harm. The inability to experience emotional cadences is not the only way that trauma disrupts narrative self-constitutions. It also makes the reality and articulation constraints nigh impossible. Trauma is felt over and over again through sensory flashbacks rather than memories. The painful mixtures of toxic emotions which rush into the trauma victim “neither lead to nor result from a process that replaced them with other emotions” (Velleman 15). They drop onto the individual like an anvil. Since trauma victims often experience vivid flashbacks, they cannot readily distinguish between their present moment and that of the painful incident. Trauma is the total repercussion of force, it is “experience that reoccurs, either as full sensory replay of traumatic events in dreams or flashbacks, with all things seen, heard, smelled, and felt intact, or as disconnected fragments” (Shay 172). Their view of their present reality falters and they see themselves as still in the initial moment of devastation. Now I will examine the testimony of a trauma victim for further understanding. One of the veterans Shay worked with described the way their traumatic past intrudes on their lives. He received a burn after returning from Vietnam, and the event triggered enduring sensory flashbacks. He told Shay the “smell of burning flesh fucked me up real bad afterward, though. I didn't notice it at the time that I caught fire, but for the next few weeks I kept having flashbacks of the time the fast-mover [jet]3 laid a canister of napalm on my company. I couldn't get the smell out of my nose, out of my mouth” (XV). This break with reality makes simply experiencing events difficult, experiencing them narratively impossible. Anything the veteran did 3 Shay’s own explanatory addition to the transcription. Cruz 14 at that time would be laced with the smell of napalm not present. In his reflections the fire not there would always confront him, covering over the actual events and masking what emotions he would have otherwise felt. Trauma victims also struggle to meet articulation constraint. Since the traumatic event continues to haunt them, speaking of it as a story from the past cuts against the way they are still enduring it. With the noxious emotions still flooding the subject, the incident has yet to become narrativized in the way an ordinary experience would be. They cannot tell a story because they cannot feel a story. There is no distance, no reflective stance to take to the pain freshly roiling the subject. The inability to feel new different emotions marks the end of narrativization. Trauma “leaves the survivor not only numbed but also without the motivation to carry out the task of constructing an ongoing narrative” (Brison 146). Rather than having emotional intelligibility of the traumatic events, one is left with only the gaping wound. Shay’s patient draws out the affective deadening and silence trauma forces onto sufferers. The powerlessness many feel to effectively communicate regarding their traumatic experiences traps them in the past, as they alone bear its burdens and cannot tell their own stories. The veteran expresses this point by stating “it still makes me mad the way nobody understands what we did over there ... nobody can understand, ‘cept maybe another ‘Nam vet. If only I could cry like the day ___ had his face shot off. I haven’t cried since then4. Never” (xix). Two distinctly important revelations come from this. The first is that the sheer isolation of his trauma reinforces its power over the wounded warrior. He feels “like a complete freak” because his trauma removes him from the social world he would otherwise inhabit, one which exists around him at all times but from which his trauma bars him entry (xix). The second 4 Shay omitted the dead soldier’s name from his published transcript Cruz 15 revelation is that he lost his capability to cry during one of the most traumatic experiences of his life. It would be wrong to say this man is numb, feeling as he does constant fear, anxiety, rage, and paranoia. However, it is fair to say that his separation from his own sorrow, exhibited in his inability to cry and the disinterest in his own life he describes elsewhere, represents a deadening of his emotional life. Rather than experiencing an emotional cadence, he remains stuck on the same looping states of anger and worry. Just as he is stuck in the past through his flashbacks and crippling fears of war encroaching on his home life, he is affectively stuck in a dead world. The varieties of emotions which enable narrativity simply have atrophied within him. As Shay’s patient closes his remarks, he pulls back and examines the fact that he could provide them. He recognizes the progress shown in his power to narrate his PTSD at length. Speaking directly to Shay, he notes “I guess it’s something that I can even talk to you like this, and you not even a ‘Nam vet and all. Remember how long it took me to say anything?5 … It was almost three years till I started to open up” (xix). This reflective moment highlights the silencing effect of trauma. Despite working with a medical professional and understanding the way his incommunicable trauma has been ruining aspects of his life the veteran could not bring himself to speak. Cut off from his emotions, haunted by flashbacks from and reactions to a war no longer being fought, this man found himself trapped in silence. Being able to narrate the traumatic events and discuss their continuing omnipresence means contextualizing, understanding, and taking cognitive control over them. He is beginning to re-incorporate these events into his narrative self-constitution in a way which he previously could not. The veteran could not reflect upon his trauma or see it with clarity because he was still stuck in the middle of it. Telling these stories is akin to pushing out beyond these moments and 5 Emphasis Shay’s. Cruz 16 grounding himself in the present, seeing the connections to his past, and setting himself up for a future of new events, new narrative episodes. Therapeutic Storytelling I have argued that our personal selves are inherently affective narrative constructions and relating to our past in this way enables comprehension of our present moments. We have seen how trauma forcibly detaches from segments of our pasts. Traumatic events can severely disrupt a person’s sense of self by disrupting the emotional cadences which ought to add narrative value to life experiences. Victims such as Shay’s patient cease to enjoy new emotions while reliving the terror and sorrow of their darkest moments. Trauma creates alienation from its origin point, thereby interfering with personhood. At this point I will offer an explanation of how we can use storytelling to re-incorporate traumatic events into our narrative self-constitutions. In her case study “‘The Past is a Foreign country’: Some Uses of Literature in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue,” Kent State University professor of English and psychiatrist Vera J. Camden describes the barrier built by traumatic disruptions in personal narratives. Her analysand, referred to as Mrs. F., suffered from “chronic, life-long depression” (Camden 102). Mrs. F. told Camden of nightmares which repeatedly visit her involving “murder, literal floods of feces, insects, maggots” which greatly disturbed the patient (105). One of these dreams became the key to a breakthrough for Mrs. F. She tells Camden that in the dream she is “severing the bones of [a] chicken, and it turns into a bunch of small kittens which I can hold … the room becomes filled with dirt and maggots; I feel like I am swimming in filth and maggots … my mother pushes her way into the room and I began stabbing her and cutting her part … She is dead and I am drowning in all of this shit and blood” (Camden 107). Cruz 17 Camden wonders aloud if Mrs. F. worried that she, Camden, would drown in the metaphorical flood wrought by these vivid images of horror. Here Mrs. F. finally recognizes the traumatic origin of her issue. One childhood summer Mrs. F’s Aunt Marge forced her to take newborn kittens “drown them in a bucket of water. Mrs. F. … could only remember doing as she was told while all watched and egged her on. It seemed to take forever to hold them down and she cried hysterically as she was forced to do this. She saw their shit in the water” (108). Aunt Marge’s horrible command left a fissure in Mrs. F.’s psyche she could not repair. The images of shit and the feeling of drowning haunted her for the rest of her life in the form of flashbacks and dreams, symptoms of her trauma. She experienced affective deadness through her inability to emotionally recapture herself. Mrs. F. could not access her traumatic past or realize the impact it was having upon her in the present. The drowning and abundance of feces she experiences in her dreams replicate the kittens’ deaths, but it was not until she narrated the crucial dream to Camden that the two could locate their traumatic origin. Mrs. F. knew that her mother had planned to abort her and the murder of innocent kittens unwanted by their potential caretaker became the unconscious focus of her rage at her potential nonexistence, an unknown epicenter which sent shockwaves throughout her life (110). Camden notes that the connection between Mrs. F.’s dreams and a traumatic experience “signaled for her … a testimony, a witness to an event the trauma of which, while only one thread in a tapestry of tragic and repeated insults and agonies, provided us with the start of her story” (110). Recognizing the moment of her trauma’s origin enabled Mrs. F. and Camden to begin reconnecting the patient with her past self. She could finally deal with the shockwave by returning to its source and incorporating it into her life story. Before she could only experience Cruz 18 its consequences, in the forms of her dreams and depression, while entirely alienated from it. Discussing the past carved out the space Mrs. F. needed to explore herself in full and bridge the traumatic fissure. Mrs. F’s narration was often “out of control, compulsively repeated. But one can control certain aspects of the narrative, and that control, repeatedly exercised, leads to greater control over the memories themselves” (Brison 149). That control leads to a rehabilitation of one’s articulation capabilities. Having drafted her story multiple times, she could exert herself over it and re-incorporate it into her narrative self-constitution. It is important to note that Mrs. F. could not have begun that process without the aid of Camden’s witness position. Mrs. F. would not have been working reflectively through her dreams, searching for symbolic resonance with her memories. More importantly, Camden, a literary professor, provided her patient with the proper understanding of her history as a narrative to reconstitute herself and her relationship with the past. Camden argues “some knowledge cannot be borne without a witness” and she witnessed Mrs. F.’s dreams over and over again, searching for some meaning hidden from the dreamer (Camden 111). By searching for connective threads between Mrs. F.’s dreams and her lived experiences, Camden was “a witness to her history … able to construct not exactly a chronology but more like a tapestry of her history filled with repeated experiences any one of which might be expected to overwhelm normal development” (111). Camden describes herself as “the occasion of Mrs. F.’s remembering and the instigator of reviving the narrative of her life” (111). Her sessions with Mrs. F. cobbled the latter back into a whole, not without seams, but attached through a constitutional narrative which could be understood and acted upon. An empathic, willing audience is crucial to recreating one’s narrative self-constitution in the face of trauma. Once a trauma victim becomes trapped by their distress and numb to new Cruz 19 feelings, they need someone who can identify the narrativity in their lives and help them come back into contact with a full range of emotions. Telling the story of one’s trauma to an empathic audience enables one to recognize the story itself. The audience can show the victim what emotions their stories ought to be triggering. Indeed “remaking a self in the aftermath of trauma highlights the dependency of the self on others and helps to explain why it is so difficult for survivors to recover when others are unwilling to listen to what they endured” (Brison 147). Without a proper guide to push victims back towards a semblance of emotional normalcy, they may never heal. As I mentioned, the listeners must be willing to endure the difficulty of listening to horrific events. Speaking to human walls who refuse to empathize, believe, or express their reactions will not help. The listener “must be ready to experience some of the terror, grief, and rage that the victim did” (Shay 189). They must be “strong enough to hear the story without having to deny the reality of the experience or to blame the victim,” indeed to affirm the events and, where appropriate, absolve any blame the victim may be misapplying to themselves or benign parties (189). Given the chance and aid to “represent our traumas and inner life, believe in the possibility of someone listening, and use that interpersonal space for translating our utterances into language” makes the unspeakable speakable (Hall 10). Once one can tell a story of their trauma, they begin to escape its grasp on their present state of being. Using others to begin experiencing emotions again, and therefore rebuild narratives, works because it is a return to how we initially learned them. While we certainly feel things without being taught what they are, we understand them by engaging others and having emotions modeled for us. Upbringings feature lessons on emoting and how to respond to emotions, as well as what events should trigger which emotional responses. Media, social interactions, and direct Cruz 20 teachings explain how to feel, what feelings are, and how to react to them. It is how we learn to exist in a social world. J.L. Austin points out that one understands anger by “ (a) noting the occasion, symptoms, manifestation, etc., in cases where other persons say ‘I am angry’ of themselves (b) being told by others, who have noted all that can be observed about him on certain occasions, that ‘You are angry’” (110). We understand our own emotions through social information. Reconnecting with them this way is wholly natural. Re-Constitution through Fiction For the remainder of this essay I will analyze Kurt Vonnegut and his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. I will argue that Vonnegut used the creation of the novel to re-incorporate the traumatic events of World War II and the fire-bombing of Dresden into his narrative self-constitution by depicting the trauma and its aftermath throughout the work. Published in 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five revolves around the life of United States soldier Billy Pilgrim, who becomes a prisoner of war after being captured by Nazi soldiers in World War II. Pilgrim and his fellow prisoners experience grueling conditions on their way to Dresden, Germany where they are forced into labor. Being in the titular slaughterhouse-five allowed Billy to survive the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. After this he worked to retrieve corpses from Dresden’s bones. Eventually Billy returns to the US, becomes a married optometrist, survives a plane crash, and begins to tell people he was abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. According to Billy these aliens see time’s true nature, with each moment occurring simultaneously and every event having always already happened. During all of these events Billy claims to have been time traveling through the saga of his life, popping in unexpectedly on his childhood, time at war, and even his death (Vonnegut). Cruz 21 The bases for Billy’s World War II experiences are Vonnegut’s own. He admits as much in Slaughterhouse-Five’s first sentences, writing “all this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true” (Vonnegut 1). Nazi soldiers captured Vonnegut and his friend Bernard V. O’Hare during the Ardennes region Battle of the Bulge in 1944, eventually taking him and other prisoners of war to Dresden. While there, acting as slaves, the Americans were held in the real underground Slaughterhouse-Five bunker. They escaped the fire-bombing of Dresden which “shortly smashes and incinerates the city, along with an estimated one hundred thousand of its noncombatant German citizens” (Beidler). In a later context, Vonnegut described his role in the aftermath of the devastation: Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead … We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. 130,000 corpses were hidden underground. It was a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt. We went to work through cordons of German soldiers. Civilians didn’t get to see what we were up to. After a few days the city began to smell, and a new technique was invented. Necessity is the mother of invention. We would bust into the shelter, gather up valuables from people’s laps without attempting identification, and turn the valuables over to guards. Then soldiers Cruz 22 would come with a flame thrower and stand in the door and cremate the people inside. Get the gold and jewelry out and then burn everybody inside. (Beidler) Digging those corpses out of the German ruins, which he says were “like the moon now, nothing but minerals,” wrought havoc upon Vonnegut’s mental state (Vonnegut 178). It deeply alienated him from the self he was before excavating and burning innocent bodies. As Vonnegut biographer Charles Shields writes, “if [Vonnegut] still had any feelings of being unique—the myth of invincibility typical of young people —despite the Battle of the Bulge, his capture, and incarceration, the dregs of those feelings must have drained off now, replaced by a profound loneliness and sense of almost cosmic isolation (72)” The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five details the utter impossibility of Vonnegut’s attempts to incorporate his World War II experiences into his narrative self-constitution after returning home from Dresden. Vonnegut tells his readers “when I got back home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen” (Vonnegut 2). His inability to narrativize Dresden did not show itself until Vonnegut attempted to write this report. It was then he discovered “not many words about Dresden came from my mind then … and not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls” (2). In a speech given the same year as Slaughterhouse-Five’s publication, Vonnegut described the torturous process of attempting to write about Dresden by saying “I would head myself into my memory of it, the circuit breaks would kick out; I’d head in again, I’d back off. … there’s this terrible hole in the middle. That is like my memory of Dresden; actually there’s nothing there” (Bellamy qtd. in Wicks 330). Cruz 23 Vonnegut’s lengthy inability to produce material based around Dresden and the painful disruption he experienced reveal his inability to meet the articulation constraint. Germany’s raw damage rendered Vonnegut speechless, unable to communicate his bare memories. He could not articulate the traumatic events in question due to the unintelligible nature of trauma. He cannot describe Dresden’s holocaust because it remained a black hole in his past. He also could not comprehend a point forward until he reincorporated that alienating part of his life with the rest of it. Vonnegut’s trauma was “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness,” evidenced here through amnesiatic silence of a man who wrote for a living (Caruth 4). In his flashes of vocalization, Vonnegut expresses the extreme mixture of harmful emotions trauma coalesces within victims. In Slaughterhouse-Five he describes one of his fellow war prisoner’s execution atop Dresden’s ruins by noting “the irony is so great” and decides it should be the novel’s climax (Vonnegut 5). When he spoke of this to family after the war, “Vonnegut burst into tears. ‘The sons of bitches! The sons of bitches!’” (Shields 76). During a return trip to Dresden with O’Hare the East German guards prevents their entry. In reaction “Vonnegut blew up, remembering how they had been held prisoner for months. ‘Goddamn it!’ … ‘They wouldn’t fucking let us out, now they won’t fucking let us in!6” (226). Vonnegut wallows deeply in alcoholism and his past, describing a tendency to “get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then … I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years” (4). These flashes of rage and sorrow coexist with Vonnegut’s affective deadness. Bubbling beneath his 6 Emphasis found in Shields. Uncertain if his or Vonnegut’s own. Cruz 24 dispassionate surface sits a toxic brew of painful emotions which get the better of him time and again. Vonnegut’s writing expresses the affective deadness those fire-bombs left in him. The author provides us with scene after scene of death and horror written from a place of emotional detachment. About Dresden Vonnegut offhandedly remarks “there must be tons of human bone meal in the ground” (1). As a reporter he saw the remains of a man squished by an elevator. When a woman asks Vonnegut if this bothered him he replies “heck no … I’ve seen lots worse than that in the war” (10). What we would expect to leave someone with nightmares does not affect this veteran at all. When a university professor tells Vonnegut about the Nazi concentration camps and their barbaric practices, he assures the professor “I know, I know. I know,” unmoved by the details of a war he experienced first-hand (10). The examples go on and on. The phrase “so it goes” follows 106 references to or depictions of death (Greene). These nonchalantly punctuate tragedies and express a complete triviality to death. They make death as uneventful in the novel as it can be in reality, where even without wars “there would still be plain old death (Vonnegut 4). Vonnegut consciously presents readers with a view into his emotional state, or lack thereof due to trauma, by downplaying the significance of terrible moments. When he directly addresses his disdain for slaughter it comes in the form of cool lessons. Vonnegut writes that he has told his sons they are “not under any circumstances to take part in massacres,” that they must not “work for companies which make massacre machinery” and of the guns his father left him that “they rust” (19, 210). Vonnegut writes in staccato bursts of information rather than emotional polemics because he cannot render the information into coherent emotions. For him this information is just that. Realizing that he could “simply tell the truth” about World War II and his dearth of feeling enabled Vonnegut to Cruz 25 report events he believed should have killed him (Anguelov). He could then tell the story just as he knows it, detached facts pertaining to some dead person other than himself. At the end of his introduction, Vonnegut compares his situation with the Old Testament story of Lot’s Wife, who God turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah after being forbid to do so. “Vonnegut naturally aligns himself with Lot’s wife since both occupy the role of spectators shattered by the act of witnessing,” especially so since both witnessed cities annihilated by fire (Wicks 330). In Lot’s Wife Vonnegut sees himself and a recognition that his years of looking back at Dresden were not shameful, but an entirely normal response to surviving a cataclysmic event, calling it “so human” (Vonnegut 22). She served as a post-traumatic role model. He recognizes how she helped him to repair himself and realize that “people aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore. I’ve finished my war book now … this one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt” (22). Here is acknowledgement from the author that writing took on the therapeutic qualities which Camden’s sessions provided for Mrs. F. by allowing him to reconnect the narrative of his history with that of his present day. He looked back at what was a confounding, mute, disruptive hole in his past and filled it in. In a letter written when Vonnegut believed he would finish Slaughterhouse-Five within a few months the author felt that “at last he had discharged a kind of duty to the past” (Shields 213). From this place of narrative unity, Vonnegut could begin anew and work to regain the internal coherence lost to his novel and the horror which inspired it. Further similarities between Vonnegut and Mrs. F exist. Both required witnesses to contextualize and work through their trauma. Mrs. F worked with her therapist, Camden, whose comments were critical in deciphering Mrs. F’s dreams. Vonnegut’s witnessing process took a Cruz 26 much different route had people who he spoke to about his Dresden book. For years when asked what he was working on Vonnegut “usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden” (3). Yet nothing could come of this novel. Even when Vonnegut visited O’Hare, who survived the fire-bombing with him, in search for inspiration none came. The two men sat together “as though war stories were coming back, but neither one of us could remember anything good” (13). Both men were held mute by trauma’s deafening silence, unable to relate even to their closest companion during the inciting event. The witnessing came from Mary, O’Hare’s wife. Furious with Vonnegut for attempting to write a war novel, Mary reminds him of the nature of his trauma. She shouts “you were just babies then!7” before accusatorily stating that Vonnegut was “not going to write it that way … you’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by … glamorous, war loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies” (Vonnegut 14). Her derision brings Vonnegut to promise “there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra … I’ll call it ‘The Children’s Crusade8’” (15). Mary provides the proper contextualization Vonnegut needed for his story. This moment represents the breakthrough which would enable him to complete the novel. Initially, he thought he could simply describe his time as a prisoner of war, but what he lacked was a way to articulate the emotional trauma of his experiences. Mary pointing out that World War II was a children’s crusade gave him one. The ensuing fictional biography of Billy Pilgrim, replete with discussions 7 Emphasis Vonnegut’s 8 The novel’s full title is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, A Fourth-Generation German-American Low Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire-Bombing of Dresden, Germany, 'The Florence of the Elbe,' a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace. Cruz 27 of baby fat, overdependence upon mothers, and a lack of maturity, force the reader to confront the notion that modern history’s most powerful nations placed children, “babies,” on its front lines. Only after the visit to the O’Hares did Vonnegut complete Slaughterhouse-Five. Mary understood and repackaged the origin of Vonnegut’s trauma in a way which he could digest. By understanding one of war’s fundamental injustices and expressing her outrage directly to Vonnegut she refocused his attention on the painful truth of his experiences. He enlisted in the US Army at just 21 years old and died at 84; over 60 years after the Dresden attack changed him forever (Editors). Grasping the horror of his youth, and knowing that being 21 puts him at the older age of enlisted soldiers, made it possible for Vonnegut to reconnect with the emotional tragedy of World War II in addition to his factual disgust. Vonnegut also draws in his audience as witnesses to his tale. The author takes care to place himself throughout Slaughterhouse-Five at various moments of the war, reminding us that Billy’s horrors are his as well. Vonnegut deals with his need to be witnessed by rendering that his personal plights known. Just as Nazi soldiers force Billy into their train, Vonnegut writes “I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare” (67). Imprisoned, Billy overhears a fellow American painfully excreting into the snow, and Vonnegut points out “that was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (125). Vonnegut deemed it necessary to give his impression of Dresden upon first arrival, calling it “Oz” before alerting us it was only the second city he had ever seen (148). Vonnegut ties himself to Billy by giving him the Luftwaffe saber the author took from Dresden (195, 6). Slaughterhouse-Five’s final chapter begins with first person explanation of Vonnegut’s 1968 conditions before telling us that he and O’Hare were some of the corpse miners digging up bodies in Dresden in 1945 (210-213). Cruz 28 These interjections allow Vonnegut to tell the story of his personal trauma while standing beside his fictional guise. They affirm Vonnegut’s presence during Billy’s traumatic events. Most of them start with some variation of “I was there.” the veteran author is calling us to witness him and the lasting suffering he endures. The beginning of Billy’s story and the chapter in which he and Vonnegut are moved to Dresden both begin with “Listen:” as the storyteller draws his audience closer to his traumatic story. By imagining himself in conversation with the public while he writes, by going through the authentically conversational process of writing a novel and talking with editors and others, Vonnegut considered how his horrific wartime experiences ought to feel for someone else. Without a directly therapeutic witness like Mrs. F had in Camden and Shay’s patients had in him, Vonnegut creates the feeling of witnessing in his novel. The creative practice, emboldened by his post at the Iowa Writers Workshop, made possible Vonnegut’s reincorporation of Dresden into his narrative self-constitution (Anguelov) Of course, Vonnegut also needed to write about Dresden for this to occur. When he finally does, Billy shares his creator’s vantage point inside slaughterhouse-five while “there were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked” (Vonnegut 177). As Billy waits, “Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn,” until “everybody else in the neighborhood was dead” (178). Much like Vonnegut’s preoccupation with Dresden, when Billy is asked to tell a story he returns to his horrible night, telling his questioner about “seeing little logs lying around. There were people who had been caught in the fire storm” (179). Vonnegut ends the novel with a description of Billy, alongside Vonnegut and O’Hare, digging bodies out of Dresden’s ruins. Once the bodies liquefied and a soldier died retching from the smell, the miners decided to Cruz 29 cremate the remains “with flamethrowers right where they were” (213). Giants, charred corpses, liquid remains. These are just some of the horrors Billy and Vonnegut endured. It is no wonder would be afflicted with traumatic memories following these events. He experiences them in full sensory re-victimizations. Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, when Billy experiences a high level of stress, during the war and following it, he slips from that moment of his life into another. According to Billy, he “first became unstuck in time in 1944 … while World War Two was in progress” (30). Being an active soldier taking fire in World War II would on its own be an incredibly stressful experience. The exact moment Billy leaves linear time is a moment of trauma. Miserable with cold and pain after wading through the snowy German forest, having narrowly avoided gunfire he hoped would strike him, Billy is “leaning against a tree with his eyes closed. His head was tilted back and his nostrils were flaring” (43). He is visibly wracked his traumatic situation. Vonnegut’s description of initially becoming unstuck in time itself also contains a powerful emotional flux. Vonnegut characterizes the experience as a movement across states of intensive sensory information: This was when Billy first came unstuck in time. His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn’t anybody else there, or any thing. There was just violet light—and a hum. And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which was red light and bubbling sounds. (43) Vonnegut’s description moves from Billy’s present physical suffering into a depiction of death as a solitary place, disconnected from any other person or thing. The sound and color impress Cruz 30 upon Billy a stark sensory overload, one he experiences in complete isolation. The era before Billy’s birth is also characterized by isolation, trapped in what seems to be a description of the womb. Passing through the fullness of Billy’s life is reminiscent of the notion that one would see their life flashing before his eyes before death. This severance from the social world and heightened sensory condition brought on by the mounting pressures of a traumatic experience match my previous discussion of trauma. This is the first instance of many when Billy exits a traumatic wartime experience in an attempt to find comfort. Billy remains at that extreme level of emotion and pain in the moment which he swings into after slipping out of time. In this first case he comes to as a young boy being taught to swim by his father. “Little Billy was terrified” by the lesson because his father planned to “throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim” (43). Vonnegut writes that the moment felt “like an execution” (44). Billy goes numb before being tossed in the pool and after sinking to the bottom begins to hear “beautiful music everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that” (44). In this near-death experience Billy feels terror, reacts with numbness to the world, and is so resigned to his death that he hates being saved. Rather than escaping the trauma of the Ardennes forest Billy visited another site of his pain. The same feelings of isolation, terrible pain, and a complete disinterest in continued life mark both experiences. Even the unplaceable sounds recur in each place Billy visits, from the death hum to the bubbling sounds of pre-birth and now the ethereal music of drowning. Rather than being an effective coping mechanism, becoming unstuck in time simply transplants Billy from trauma to trauma. Pointedly, Billy experiences involuntary time travel; he “came unstuck in time” (43). Rather than voluntarily engaging in time travel, Billy’s psyche forces him to escape hardships. Cruz 31 Vonnegut begins the Billy’s story telling readers is has come unstuck, briefly explains what this means, and then stops to clarify that this is what “he says,” a statement set on its own (23). Vonnegut immediately undermines the credibility of Billy’s purported temporal spasms. He does not dwell on the point, but by highlighting this fact early Vonnegut ensures that readers take in the entirety of Billy’s story with a grain of salt. This pushes us away from the realm of speculative fiction and into one of a drama which will revolve around one man and his inability to deal with the incredible trauma of his life. Readers learn right after this moment that Billy “has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next9” (23). Billy’s traumatic memories often spring from moments of high stress to similar ones experiences at another moment. After crying in bed and witnessing a group of people with disabilities walking through his street, Billy is suddenly whisked away to Luxembourg, “marching with a lot of other prisoners. It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes” (63). The broken men marching through the cold and the sting of tears carry clear similarities to the memory’s inciting incident. In the camp Billy takes a shower described as a “blowtorch that did not warm. It jazzed and jangled Billy’s skin without thawing the ice in the marrow of his long bones” and he returns to a much gentler bathing when he was a baby (84). After being put to sleep by a fellow prisoner, he travels to his time in a mental hospital after the war (99). Valencia, Billy’s wife, brings him back to the camp by asking about the execution he witnessed after Dresden’s fire-bombing (123). The random and painful way Billy travels through his life bear greater resemblance to the flashbacks suffered by PTSD victims than they do science-fiction’s hallmark time traveling. 9 Emphasis mine Cruz 32 They are Billy reliving his trauma and attempting to divorce himself from it by envisioning the future. These chaotic temporal displacements which “send him reeling from present to past to present again—are best understood when read as traumatic memory” (Wicks 331). All these moments and more show the ever-present nature of trauma, lurking beneath the surface, waiting to hijack the victim’s present with a return to the still-happening past. Trauma prevents Billy from fully experiencing anything. It keeps him in temporal flux and emotional duress. The flashes make coherent narrative self-constitutions impossible. Billy literally cannot experience his daily life without intrusion from the past and his visions of the future. The “stage fright” he feels is the only thing he can safely rely on. That anxious dread of being whisked out of an experience without warning alone is constant. Billy has no way to take in the experiences of his life which would otherwise form his narrative self-constitution. He simply is unable to go through them without being battered into another time and space by his trauma. It undermines his narrativization at every step. Eventually the flashbacks and sensory reminders of his trauma force Billy to break with reality. On the same night he claims to have been abducted by Tralfamadorians Billy sees various Billy’s backyard is filled with an orange and black striped tent for his daughter’s wedding (72). The orange and black stripes are the same as the “striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train … was carrying prisoners of war,” the train in which Billy nearly froze to death in, and others did freeze to death in, while being transported through Germany (69). At the same time Billy notices that his bare feet are “ivory and blue,” a symbol Vonnegut uses repeatedly to invoke the dead (72). On his way to the aforementioned train in 1944 Billy witnesses “corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory” (65). Sighting these reminders of his treatment fills Billy with terror. He moves “guided by dread and the lack of dread” until a Cruz 33 drunk’s call causes Billy to smell his “mustard gas and roses” breath (73). That smell is the stench of Dresden’s “corpse mines” where “bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas” (214). It is no coincidence that Vonnegut places Billy’s grandest hallucination of all on a night full of such vivid, sensory triggers of his trauma. The barrage of sights and smells place Billy back in several separate yet all horrifying moments of his nightmarish time as a prisoner of war, and Billy must escape to another world to outrun the paralyzing dread threatening to overtake him. Vonnegut provides plenty of hints that Billy’s Tralfamadorian stories serve as a traumatized man’s poor coping techniques. Although Billy places his abduction on the night of his daughter’s wedding he would not imagine Tralfamadore until years later. After surviving a plane crash, Billy quietly lays in his hospital bed while “preparing letters and lectures about the flying saucers, the negligibility of death, and the true nature of time” (190). This is the genesis of Billy’s belief in the alien world of Tralfamadore. The details he takes from science fiction. Staying in a veteran’s hospital after a nervous breakdown, Billy and another World War II veteran read copious amounts of speculative fiction because they were “trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help” (101). The writer Billy loves is Kilgore Trout whose novel’s mostly “dealt with time warps and extrasensory perception and other unexpected things,” the exact things Billy thinks he experiences (175). On the night Billy announces his abduction, he rediscovers a Trout book about “an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo,” a description matching what he believes happened to him on the alien planet (201). Moments later he reads of Montana Wildhack’s disappearance, the woman he believes he met on Tralfamadore (204). Cruz 34 By gesturing towards the falsity of Billy’s claims and showing that they came about as a method for dealing with his unbearable trauma Vonnegut shows us what his own life could have been like. The same slings and arrows fell upon the author and his creation. The latter sought solace in fantastical narratives because he could no longer comprehend the events of his own life. He could not understand, discern, or articulate what ought to have been his narrative self-constitution. He attempted to bring narrativity into his life by literally losing himself in fictions. Vonnegut had the luxury of depicting himself in a work of fiction with enough of the important details lifted from his own life to re-engage them, see them up close, analyze and comprehend them, render them knowable, feelable. Unfortunately Billy depicts what some trauma victims do become. People deceived by their minds and bodies until they break clean off from reality. In writing Slaughterhouse-Five to heal himself, Vonnegut showed what trauma does to its prey and a path to self-reconciliation. Millions have now borne witness to his tragic tale, and one can only hope that they gleamed his lessons well. Not only the lessons on healing, but the more important lesson not to hurt anyone in the first place. Cruz 35 Works Cited Anguelov, Zlatko. “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” The Writing University. 2013. Web. 3 Dec. 2016. Austin, J. L. Philosophical Papers. Eds. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Print. Beidler, Philip. “What Kurt Vonnegut Saw in World War II that Made Him Crazy (Along with Billy Pilgrim, Rabo Karabekian, Eliot Rosewater, et al.).” Michigan Quarterly Review. Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 15 Sept. 2010. Web. 8 Apr. 2016. Brison, Susan. “Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity.” Gender struggles: Practical approaches to contemporary feminism. Eds. Constance L. 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