Living A Trauma

Billy suffers a very interesting trauma on chapter eight of Slaughterhouse-Five, making a mental connection to his human side, even if he seems completely fictional sometimes. It happens in his anniversary, when he had a big celebration going on and the time came to give his wife a ring he had for her as a present. When the optometrist began singing in, Kurt describes Billy’s reaction as follows: “and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again. Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really where being stretched on the torture engine called the rack (Slaughterhouse-Five, p. 173).” Billy was having a physical reaction to music: a negative one. It is very interesting to encounter this scene only a month or so after my reading of A Clockwork Orange, for the main character of the previous has a very similar trauma, and music is also one of the triggering factors. This scene is extremely similar to the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex lies locked up in his room and is woken up by music from a room near-by: “I slooshied for two seconds in like interest and joy, but then it all came over me, the start of the pain and the sickness, and I began to groan deep down my keeshkas. And there I was, me who had loved music so much, crawling off the bed and going oh oh oh to myself (A Clockwork Orange, p.187).” Both characters have a strong response to music, as a factor that triggers an unpleasant memory in the past. It makes them both so human and vulnerable even with all their mystery. The contexts are different, but if you take a look at the look of these traumas you find certain similarities. Alex had a whole part of his life imposed to a treatment repeated over and over again causing the trauma. On his side, Billy had experienced a war which had marked his life many times, because not only had he lived it once, but we know how he travels in time to parts of the war, reinforcing the initial trauma. The objective of trauma in both novels is to show misery in human life, to show how crude and evil living has become. Both authors make us wonder if life is really that great, they make us think about what may be the reality behind living, about how life may not be worth living after all. I already know how Alex and his story ends, now let’s find out how it all settles out for Billy Pilgrim.