Billy Pilgrim Sane

They could always visit him or her with the use of time travel when he or she was alive. Because the phrase was very often repeated, it somewhat served as a tally to show how frequently death occurs and just how inevitable it is. Billy knew the exact date of his death and how it would happen, but he could not alter it and was no longer afraid of dying, so it had no effect on him because “there is no why[,]” it just “simply is” (77; ch4). He learned this from the Tralfamadorians.

SlaughterHouse-Five is a book about a man named Billy Pilgrim who is stuck in time, and constantly travels throughout different events in his life. Billy accepts different values and sees traumatic and morbid events differently than others. Billy accepts a way of life that is not perceivable to other humans. Many would argue that Billy’s experiences make him insane, but Billy’s experiences with the Tralfamadorians actually allows him to preserve his sanity, and stay a very intelligent man.

Billy has a history of mental problems he has been institutionalized twice. The first time was when he father died this was while he was in training, before he went off to war. The second time was when he came back from the war. Plus he had the head injury from the plane crash. He only started talking about the Tralfamadorians after the plane. And it's odd that every thing about the Tralfamadorians is from those good old Kilgore Trout novels. Now remember Billy first started to read Trout's novels when he committed himself, this was second time he was in the nut house it was after the war. The whole notion of time, the

Billy Pilgrim is a very important character in the book because he is one of the main characters in the novel of Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim is an older man that had a wife who passed away, and has two kids. He ended up going to college after high school to be an optometrist. Billy then got drafted into the war for World War 2.

Once Billy becomes capable of time travel and comes into contact with the Tralfamadorians, he simply goes through the motions of life but avoids falling into a defeatist attitude. Under the tutelage of the Tralfamadorians, Billy fashions a brand new perspective towards society and enhances his natural persona, “When Billy accepts the Tralfamadorian philosophy, the passivity that he has displayed his entire life—from wanting to drift quietly at the bottom of the YMCA pool after his father throws him in, to begging Roland Weary to leave him behind—is justified. If the future cannot be changed anyway, why even try?” (Farrell 9). Though the interaction with the Tralfamadorians seems to allow Billy an outlet to construct his own ideals upon the universe, he nonetheless continues along the same path as before. Billy becomes an extremist towards passivity in life rather than utilizing the experience to impart a strong impression

We know this because he starts making up stories about aliens called Tralfamadorians, who supposedly abducted him and actress Montana Wildhack (who has actually died/is missing in real life). His insanity reaches a fever point when he starts talking in gibberish-like language. “The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn’t be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five years. There couldn’t be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on. It was gibberish to Billy” (Vonnegut 114). This tells us that Billy has been the victim of a dramatic downward spiral that started from when he saw the remnants of what had been the glorious city of Dresden. He has reached an advanced stage in his mental illness as he has already started talking about things that he himself thinks make no sense. This furthermore shows us that war can be devastating as many veterans in real life, like Billy, suffer from mental distress that is very similar to this.

As stated in the first chapter and implied by its secondary title, Slaughterhouse Five is, at its core, an anti-war book. Before we even enter into the life Billy Pilgrim, we are given a quick look at the bleak reality of war, how it is often over-glorified by the aging military officers who document it; we are reminded that these wars are fought by the young, hence The Children’s Crusade. Entering Billy’s life, we see a sharp contrast to this preliminary theme: he seems to show no concern for his life or any distress when his son joins the military. His story is fragmented and disjointed, concurrent with his emotional instability, which serves to give us a sense of Billy’s disorientation within his life. The beginning, middle and end of the

Billy’s mental illness shows suffering of post-traumatic stress After reading and studying Kurt Vonnegut’s novel of Slaughterhouse Five, I have concluded that Billy’s mental illness shows suffering of post-traumatic stress. While analysing different critics’ opinions and views on this, I found similar ideas while showing different viewpoints on what post-traumatic stress is and how Billy shows this. Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist in this novel where his primary source of post-traumatic stress is from World War II where he was a prisoner of war; however other events in his life also added to his trauma. Post-traumatic stress is defined as a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing

Billy Pilgrim is a very complex character. There are many parts of his life that seem too strange to be real. One of the most interesting aspects of Billy’s character is his resemblance to the Christ figure. Billy is a very simple man who never seems to hold a grudge against the people who despise him and “conforms” to his fate. His fate being shot with a laser on Friday 13, 1976 (Vonnegut 180). According to the Bible, the Christ figure Jesus was crucified on Good Friday. Jesus also knew he would die, and did nothing to stop the process. He even goes as far as to say that he will prepare a place for us (the people of Earth) and that he will “come again” (John 14:1-31, ESV). Billy utters a similar response to the police that offer to stay with

For example, he has seen his death, yet when he visits that time, he does nothing to prevent his death but instead tell others he will die soon. From the Tralfamadorians, Billy has learned that time is not single events occurring in order, but that all events are occurring simultaneously forever. Therefore, everything has already happened and will happen at the same time and cannot be altered. This belief could explain why Billy never really tries to do or say anything in the novel. He is traveling through his life out of order, so he already knows and has acknowledged what will happen and has no desire to change it. He has no free will over his own life, which he seems to

However, he mostly travels to Tralfamadore, a planet far from earth. He was abducted by Tralfamadorians on the night before his daughter’s wedding and he is held captive in a zoo on the Tralfamadore. During his time on the planet, Billy meets many people that influence his ideas of death and free will. Billy travels back to Tralfamadore many times during the novel. It is during these visits Billy’s transformation begins to occur. In addition while staying at the camp, he flashes forward to giving a boy an eye examine and sharing his experiences on Tralfamdore with him. However, the mother of the boy quickly realizes Billy is insane and Billy’s daughter has to come pick him up to go home. This is the first time in the novel when someone else realizes Billy has become senile and crazy. The next day at the POW camp, Billy wakes up and realizes he is being transported to Dresden with the other American

The Tralfamadorians, as mentioned earlier, believe that nothing is preventable, for example, their pilot pressing the button that leads to the destruction of the universe. “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, and always will exist” (pg. 27), say the Tralfamadorians. As Billy conceives the idea that the war could not have been prevented, it absolves him of all the guilt he had amassed as a result of the war: the fact that he survived, and that fact that he had a good job, as well as a family. The concept behind this is one that involves ‘free will’ . As the Tralfamadorians project the idea that there is no such thing as ‘free will’, Billy is assured implicitly that he did not have a choice in his course of action, and is hence, ‘free’ of any moral responsibility.

After reading and studying Kurt Vonnegut’s novel of Slaughterhouse Five, I have concluded that Billy’s mental illness shows suffering of post-traumatic stress. While analysing different critics opinions and views on this, I found similar ideas while showing different viewpoints on what post-traumatic stress is and how Billy shows this. The two critics I studied were Wayne D McGinnis (1990), F Brett Cox (2017). These critics show how Billy uses his imagination as a means of escaping reality, how science fiction helped him and the structure that Vonnegut used throughout the novel.

At the same time if Billy Is just an observer of the war, then why is he truly there? It’s simple, he was drafted. Billy as a character is thrown around a whole lot. First, it is with being drafted and sent to Luxembourg, next it’s when he is taken prisoner by the Nazis, and finally again when he is abducted by the Tralfamadorians and is unhinged and thrown through time without much control over where he is going. Nevertheless, the reason Billy is so out of place in is because, Billy is the lens in which the reader sees the war, Dresden, the prison camps, and all the other awful things

Early in Slaughterhouse-five the reader is made aware that Billy had an indifferent viewpoint about death. As he spent more time with the Tralfamadorians, aliens Pilgrim made up for comfort as a result to suffering from war memories, he accepted their beliefs and became numb towards death. He became closely attached to the Tralfamadorian saying “so it goes”(2), a phrase stated after the mention of death. This phrase refers to the never ending time cycle that will keep going even after someone has died and that moving on is only necessary. This helps Billy accept death and move on during the war. From here on, Billy has already accepted death and continues to jump from one memory to the other caused by his post traumatic stress disorder. When he