Billy Pilgrim is the unlikeliest of antiwar
heroes. An unpopular and complacent weakling even before the war
(he prefers sinking to swimming), he becomes a joke as a soldier.
He trains as a chaplain’s assistant, a duty that earns him disgust
from his peers. With scant preparation for armed conflict, no weapons,
and even an improper uniform, he is thrust abruptly into duty at
the Battle of the Bulge. The farcical spectacle created by Billy’s
inappropriate clothing accentuates the absurdity of such a scrawny,
mild-mannered soldier. His azure toga, a leftover scrap of stage
curtain, and his fur-lined overcoat, several sizes too small, throw
his incongruity into relief. They underscore a central irony: such
a creature could walk through war, oblivious yet unscathed, while so
many others with more appropriate attire and provisions perish.
It is in this shocked and physically exhausted state that Billy first
comes “unstuck in time” and begins swinging to and fro through the
events of his life, past and future.
Billy lives a life full of indignity and so,
perhaps, has no great fear of death. He is oddly suited, therefore,
to the Tralfamadorian philosophy of accepting death. This fact may
point to an interpretation of the Tralfamadorians as a figment of
Billy’s disturbed mind, an elaborate coping mechanism to explain
the meaningless slaughter Billy has witnessed. By uttering “So it goes”
after each death, the narrator, like Billy, does not diminish the
gravity of death but rather lends an equalizing dignity to all death,
no matter how random or ironic, how immediate or removed. Billy’s
father dies in a hunting accident just as Billy is about to go off
to war. So it goes. A former hobo dies in Billy’s railway car while
declaring the conditions not bad at all. So it goes. One hundred
thirty thousand innocent people die in Dresden. So it goes. Valencia
Pilgrim accidentally kills herself with carbon monoxide after turning
bright blue. So it goes. Billy Pilgrim is killed by an
assassin’s bullet at exactly the time he has predicted, in the realization
of a thirty-some-year-old death threat. So it goes. Billy awaits
death calmly, without fear, knowing the exact hour at which it will
come. In so doing, he gains a degree of control over his own dignity
that he has lacked throughout most of his life.
The novel centers on Billy Pilgrim to a degree that excludes
the development of the supporting characters, who exist in the text
only as they relate to Billy’s experience of events.
