I just finished reading Slaughterhouse V and near the end I felt disappointed at what I think are conceits made that explain away all of Billy Pilgrim's experiences in time travel as manufacturings of his imagination.
He finds out about Montana in a German porno store when he sees a picture of her. He sees her locket in the same store. Many other things that 'happen' on Tralfamadore are referenced in other scenes in the book, which makes me think that when Billy hit his head in the plane crash that he begins to mix reality and his imagination into the alien abduction story that he makes up.
Also, nearly any time that Billy is 'back in the war' or 'time traveling' he seems to have fallen asleep and is usually woken up back in the present.
As I started to think about it, I liked the book less because it was less fantastic.
Any thoughts?
I had assumed he wasn't traveling in time but rattling things from his head. After all, we establish a present but he also tells us about his murder. There is no physical conceit for time travel -- simply that he's not in control of when he is. The first sentence is "Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." Whether anyone else perceives this is immaterial. That's how Vonnegut worked: "and so it goes." Vonnegut had been trying to figure out how to tell the story of the Dresden firebombing. He was there, but its impact got eclipsed by the atomic bombs in Japan. He was only able to unravel the tale by wrapping it in other tales. Being unstuck in time, whatever way it happens, lets us look at a bigger event in a digestible way.
I get why the story was told that way. But I think that something you said suggests that he actually did travel through time. He predicted his own death and it came to pass. Unless he paid someone to do it then it's a strong suggestion that he did actually experience time in the way that the Tralfamidorians did.
I've waffled on this before. Ultimately, I don't think it matters, and we really shouldn't care whether he is actually time traveling or not. I think one way you could read it is as a story about a man suffering from severe PTSD. At this point, he's old, traumatized, and starting to lose touch with reality. His mind wanders into the past and into a future he is imagining to cope with the end of his life. That's a pretty touching story. Or maybe he was really time traveling, and really was abducted by aliens. There's no proof, so who's to say? What would be the difference anyway? From our perspective, and from Billy's perspective, the result is the same: a feeling of being "unstuck" and everything overlapping. That feeling is the whole point of the book, and I think, it's a book worth reading. If it hurts the book for you, well, so it goes.
I never noticed any of the stuff you mentioned; I guess I didn't read it carefully enough. I considered him to be a reliable narrator, and what he says he experienced happened. But I think I am often on the opposite side of a lot of those vaguely-interpretable books, like I say that at the end of 1984 Winston isn't really killed, and it's more a metaphor of being fully brainwashed. (Uh... spoilers by the way.) But back to Slaughterhouse 5, I think if I had read it like you say it is, I probably would have liked it more. I felt the alien abduction stuff was completely jarring and disjointed from the war stuff, and it would have made a lot more sense to me if I realized at the end that he was an unreliable narrator. Probably would have made a better book for me. I like books with psychological elements like that. Now I feel half-obliged to re-read it and see if I like it better. :/