The novels of Kilgore Trout serve to connect Billy Pilgrim
to a particular kind world view (outside the mainstream) and may also be suggestive of
the author's view of himself at the time Slaughterhouse Five was
being written.
The interpretation expressed above does have
textual evidence to support it to some extent, however at the end of the novel the
narrator expresses a qualified belief in Billy's "delusions". This points to a reading
that would see Billy's time-travel as actual, within the context of the novel, so we
would need to come up with another intepretation for Trouts novels that is not connected
to the explanation of delusion. (Also, when this novel was written post-traumatic stress
syndrome did not exist and its precursor, shell-shock, did not have the same associated
symptoms.)
In Slaughterhouse Five,
Billy is distinguished again and again from almost everyone around him. He
simply cannot connect with people. This is true of his relationship to everyone from his
wife to his son to Weary and his daughter. The only person Billy nearly connects with is
Trout, more through his novels than through their
meetings.
Importantly, Trout's novels explore
another way to look at the world, one which is not determined by a collective, by
society, or by logic. The fact that sanity is connected to the same
society that can bomb a city (killing nearly 150,000 people who were not fighting and
have no connection to the war) suggests that sanity might be better defined in another
way.
Billy breaks from the mental conventions of his
society as does the narrator. Both feel that peaceful existence is better than violent
existence. They are in the minority, it would seem, in holding to his opinion. Like
Kilgore Trout, Billy and the narrator are willing to pit their own views against those
of the majority (and, in Vonnegut's case, express them in book
form).
They are willing to appear crazy if believing that
war is unnecessary marks them as insane.
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