Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five, but who is he? Billy’s war time experience is taken from Kurt Vonnegut’s. But is he truly Kurt Vonnegut? Most have classified the novel as being semi-autobiographical and while the war experiences of Vonnegut have characterized Pilgrim, he is not really Vonnegut as we think of him. Billy’s life is unfortunate, pathetic and at times horrifically funny. It could be that Vonnegut is simply writing about himself in a self-deprecating way. Or, it could be that Billy Pilgrim is only a piece of Kurt Vonnegut. It could be that Billy Pilgrim is the ego. It could be that Edgar Derby is the super-ego. And it could be that Paul Lazzaro is the id. How you say? Very simply. Billy Pilgrim rationalizes the futility of life to please the id (i.e. Billy resigning himself to death at the hands of Lazzaro), Derby is the strong-willed character who acts on societal principles (i.e. heading to war despite his age because of his students going) and Lazzaro is the instinctual, primal facet (i.e. preoccupation with revenge and death). These character are all soldiers, all POWs and all at the bombing of Dresden. If I were to pontificate briefly, I would say the bombing split Vonnegut’s literary representation into Pligrim, Derby and Lazzaro. And they are all necessary for Slaughterhouse Five.
Billy Pilgrim lives a depressing life. Between his wife, his daughter and son, his job and his brushes with death and the knowledge the Traflamadorians give him about time, he lives a fantastic, but terrifyingly sad existence. Yet, he rationalizes his life and accepts it. Why? Because death is coming. And he knows it. Billy Pilgrim knows when he is going to die. So he satisfies the id (more on that later), by accepting his life and allowing everything to move forward until his inevitable death. Despite what the novel says about time travel and the lack of free will (So it goes), he does not acknowledge or rile against the eventually quenching of the id’s thirst for vengeance.
Edgar Derby lives with the knowledge that his high school students were being sent to war, so he gets himself into the war because he did not want to sit back in the States while they fought. This supremely moral decision, though maybe ill-advised, is the type of principle that had to be deeply engrained in Derby. He puts himself in danger to protect his idea of what is right and wrong. When Derby dies, the novel makes more sense. Killed over a stolen teapot, his moral decision wasted on a meaningless death (even the novel does not call much attention to the death of the strongest moral character). The lifeless feeling of the novel and the lack of ethics come from the fact that Derby is dead and died with little to show for his strong values
Paul Lazzaro is obsessed with primal, baser instincts, vengeance and violence. He kills Billy Pilgrim in 1976 after being convinced by Roland Weary that he was responsible for Weary’s death. He is the coming death and the end of Billy Pilgrim. The destruction of the rational mind that works to please the id and thus this closes the circle. Derby is dead, Billy Pilgrim is dead and the id, the instinctual, ends everything, which in and of itself is an instinctual motivation.
This entire argument hinges on believing Freud (which I personally don’t) and ignoring the fact Vonnegut is just simply the narrator of the story. “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” (29) comes after a first chapter where Vonnegut talks about writing the book. So most of this has to be disregarded in order to accept this principle. But just because facets of Derby and Lazzaro are based off of people Vonnegut knew does not negate the possibility of the characters being fractured pieces of Vonnegut.
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