So it Goes

          I am going to take a different stand from other points of argument. Instead of looking at the land of Tralfamadore as a truthful place within the plane of Slaughterhouse Five, I am going to look at it as if it isn't real, and instead Billy is traumatized by his experiences in the war. There are many examples that show this to potentially be the case within the book, from when and where he travels in time, to what he says.

          One of the first parallels between Billy's time travel and PTSD or something similar (I'm not going to try to diagnose him, I know far too little about psychology or anything like that to even make a laughable guess) is the first couple of times we see Billy time travel. From Vonnegut's telling of the story, we hear that billy first time traveled while in enemy territory with the two scouts and Roland Weary. In this event, Billy jumps several places, but some of the earliest are two later mentioned events, those being his father "teaching" him to swim by dropping him in the water and let him flail around until he learned to not drown and his experiences on vacation in Arizona, seeing the Grand Canyon and praying that he doesn't fall in, and being in a cave and praying the ceiling doesn't collapse on him. These are two separate traumatic events from his early life that early on are referenced through time travel. These events are later cited by doctors as the reason he acts the way he does, which may be true, however that isn't important to what I am doing.

          The next point of interest is Billy's travel in time to his kidnapping by Tralfamadorians. Any events that involve Tralfamadore seem to act differently than other events in the story, except for his initial kidnapping. He still goes there via time travel, rather than just summoning us to the planet to hear about what is going on there. The events in which Billy time travels always seem to have a connection: they all involve traumatizing or at least worrying events, such as kidnap or heights. Since these are supposedly taking place while Billy is a prisoner of war, they could be in the same vein as the hobo in Billy's train car, saying "this isn't bad. I've had worse. This is nothing." Billy could be diminishing the effect of the trauma by conjuring up worse events in his memory to deal with the stress.

          This fits well with my last connection, the one thing he says more often than anything else, "so it goes." This phrase fits the Tralfamadorian psychology incredibly well, by saying that it doesn't matter that person died. He can always go back and live good memories instead. For someone trying to overcome immense trauma, say, from the murder of thousands of people, claiming that all of their deaths are ultimately pointless and they're doing just fine is similar to a parent comforting a child when something goes bad "it's going to be OK." By saying that the person lying dead in front of you is going to be OK, they're just OK somewhere else, takes a lot of the strain and trauma out of the situation by distancing himself from the event.

          In all, it seems that the majority of the strange and wacky events that occur n this story are at least in part triggered by Billy's innate reaction to tell himself that everything is not as bad as it seems, and in fact for most parties involved, they're schmoozing elsewhere having a great time. No need to worry, everything's under control. By taking on this mentality, Billy can rest easy, saying that for anything bad, so it goes.