Don't Debunk Billy

In my recent panel presentation, I choose the article "Spastic Time" by Adam Barrows. I want to elaborate on some points I didn't go into dept or didn't touch on in class.

The article, in short, revolves around the fact that we shouldn't be trying to diagnose Billy's mental condition. When we try to diagnose Billy, we input our own and society's own preconception of what is normal in the diagnosis. Here lies the problem: Our preconception of what is healthy or normal is very different from someone else's.

But, is Billy really mentally ill? Is any of the Trafedorians real?
We find ourselves asking this question when we learn more and more about Trafedorians' idealogy about time and death. Adam makes a point that we shouldn't be asking this question in the first place.
He said,

"The point is not to prove whether Billy is sane or lying. But rather, the point is that Vonnegut wants us to be suspicious of our overwhelming need to ask those questions in the first place and, in answering them, to rely on limited conceptions of health and wellness that have constrained the very ways in which we have framed the questions."

Because asking if Billy is mentally ill mean we aren't really evaluating what Billy's experience is. We are disregarding his experience traveling through time; How someone like Billy really see time. We could disregard Billy's experience as hallucinations --- then we get a really boring book. Vonnegut wants us to throw all our preconceptions out the window and join Billy in this wild world of his. Adam calls it "disable narrative/writing."

Now, what is disable narrative or writing?

Basically, rather than describe/portray the disabled accurately, you would rather explore their experience. Vonnegut does this through the Trafedorians. If we were to ignore the Trafedorians because Billy is "mentally ill", then we would basically ignore Vonnegut's entire writing style. An example of this is when the Trafedorans ask Billy if he was happy in the alien zoo. He replies with he is "about as happy" as he was on Earth. Vonnegut usage of the Trafeldorians to help us see the fact that Earth already has its ways of dehumanizing, diagnosing, and caging the disabled people much like the zoo on Trafeldore.

To be clear, Adam doesn't argue that Billy isn't mentally ill but rather we should look at his surroundings and experience. The culture can't always be blamed for the disease. However, Adam includes a quote from Vonnegut to illustrate the point with diagnosing the mentally ill.

"Vonnegut gives the example of a mentally tortured concentration camp guard who is cured of "mental illness" and this enable to do the grisly work of Auschwitz untroubled by bad brain chemistry (...) the moral of the story (...) is that society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health"

Work Cited

Barrows, Adam. “‘Spastic in Time’: Time and Disability in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 12, no. 4, 2018, pp. 391–405. EBSCOhost, doi:10.3828/jlcds.2018.32.