One of the reasons Billy decides to invent Montana, aside from just sexual fantasizing, is his desire to feel important without actual responsibility. The zoo itself is a representation of an ideal environment, safe and comfortable without having to worry about anything or work to keep it, and Montana is an extension of that. When she is brought to Tralfamadore, she asks to sleep with Billy without his doing anything, making him feel as though she is the one who is attracted to him despite the disparity in physical attractiveness between the two. Interestingly enough, when she has a child he feels no responsibility to stay and help take care of it; in the bookstore he seems to feel no guilt about leaving Montana on her own in the zoo. She simply doesn't register to him as a person, just an extension of his desires. Importantly, she also provides a convenient excuse for him to look back on the war: he can tell himself that he is only doing it because she asks him to, not because he wants to!
The biggest proof for Montana's invented nature is her locket. Everything about the locket calls back to other things from Billy's "real" life. First off, the picture in the locket of Montana's mother is described in exactly the same terms as her own pictures in the magazine -- "They were grainy things, soot and chalk. They could have been anybody." Secondly, the inscription of the serenity prayer matches the copy hanging on the wall in Billy's office. The only unique feature she has to make her seem like an actual human being with a history and personality is completely drawn from Billy's own experiences on Earth.
It makes sense to see Montana as a projection/fantasy of Billy's (or, even more, final "proof" that the whole Tralfamadore thing is a projection/fantasy)--like Evelyn Nesbit as first an image on Younger Bro's wall who he sort of wills into his own actual existence, her role as a porn star makes her a kind of professional object of men's fantasies, and there's something characteristically passive about Billy's fantasy: the aliens set them up, at first she's not into it, but eventually (what else is she going to do?) she comes around.
ReplyDeleteBut it's especially interesting to think about in terms of her role as the primary audience for Billy's story--the very story Vonnegut has been working himself up to telling. It's as if he's indulging her (rather childlike) request for him to "tell her a story," and as you say, this means he doesn't have to see himself as willingly "going back there." But Vonnegut could have simply *narrated* the air raid, with Billy as the focal character, as he does all the other sections. This one especially has the feeling of a repressed memory, or something that can't be represented directly but must be filtered through a few levels of remove before it can be told. There's something jarringly incongruous about Billy, reclining and telling the tale in a leisurely tone, and the incomprehensible enormity of the event itself.