Billy Pilgrim War

Billy Pilgrim is the person that the book is written around. We follow him, perhaps not in a straight order, from his youth joining the military to his abduction on the alien planet of Tralmalfadore, to his older age at his 1960s home in Illum. It is his experiences and journeys that we follow, and his actions we read about. However, Billy had a specific lack of character for a main one. He is not heroic, he has very little personality traits, let alone an immersive and complex character. Most of the story is written around his experiences that seem more like symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his World War Two days, combined with hallucinations after a brain injury in a near-fatal plane

In order to illustrate the devastating affects of war, Kurt Vonnegut afflicted Billy Pilgrim with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which caused him to become “unstuck in time” in the novel. Billy Pilgrim illustrates many symptoms of PTSD throughout the story. Vonnegut uses these Slaughterhouse Five negative examples to illustrate the horrible and devastating examples of war. The examples from the book are parallel to real life experiences of war veterans, including Vonnegut’s, and culminate in a very effective anti-war novel.

Vonnegut is Kilgore Trout in the novel. The first line of the novel is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time"(23). By using the word "unstuck", Vonnegut implies that Billy has now become free. Consequently, Vonnegut's narrative, as well as Billy,

Billy Pilgrim's life is far from normal. Throughout most of his adult life he has been moving backwards and forwards through time, from one event to another, in a non-sequential order. At least, this schizophrenic life is hard to understand. Because Vonnegut wants the reader to relate to Billy

Billy Pilgrim has not come unstuck in time; Billy has become a victim of violent warfare. Common to many soldiers of war, he has witnessed such horrific events during the bombing of Dresden that he has acquired Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In order to avoid the reality of his cruel life and of the war, Billy has become dependant on escapism. Through escapism he has created the planet of Tralfamadore and the Tralfamadorians.

Many people returned from World War II with disturbing images forever stuck in their heads. Others returned and went crazy due to the many hardships and terrors faced. The protagonist in Slaughter-House Five, Billy Pilgrim, has to deal with some of these things along with many other complications in his life. Slaughter House Five (1968), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is an anti-war novel about a man’s life before, after and during the time he spent fighting in World War II. While Billy is trying to escape from behind enemy lines, he is captured and imprisoned in a German slaughterhouse. The author tells of Billy’s terrible experiences there. After the war, Billy marries and goes to school to

The main event in the novel was the fire-bombing on Dresden during World War II, which both Vonnegut and Pilgrim took part of. Billy Pilgrim was constantly traveling back in time to WWII already knowing this tragedy was going to take place. But again, he went on with life because he knew he could not stop the bombing from

As the reader followed that plot of the novel, the main conflict is the person versus person, or the killing of each individual house guest against the

In Slaughterhouse Five, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, becomes “unstuck in time,” (Vonnegut). Billy’s mental state takes a drastic turn after witnessing the bombing of Dresden during World War II. In the novel, Kurt Vonnegut uses the fantastical notion of time travel to portray the negative effects on the soldiers who fight in wars.

While never a defeatist, Billy merely flows through his disjointed life without much heed to the event at hand. Billy realizes that he holds the power to create his own happiness and satisfaction out of life through appreciation of the present moment rather than contemplate the occurrence of past and future. Vonnegut develops Billy Pilgrim as a unique protagonist as a means of forcing the reader to question the application of free will upon society and gain a new perspective on the beauty of the present.

In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a fictional character named Bill Pilgrim is used to depict the various themes about life and war. Vonnegut went through some harsh times in Dresden, which ultimately led to him writing about the tragedies and emotional effects that come with war. By experiencing the war first handed, Vonnegut is able to make a connection and relate to the traumatic events that the soldiers go through. Through the use of Billy Pilgrim and the other characters, Vonnegut is able show the horrific affects the war can have on these men, not only during the war but after as well. From the very beginning Vonnegut portrays a strong sense of anti-war feelings, which he makes most apparent through Billy Pilgrim.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel is based on a man named Billy Pilgrim who is an anti-war hero; he was the most unprepared soldier of them all and was considered a joke. Pilgrim was scrawny and tall; going into the war he did not have any proper equipment. Throughout the story Billy is time traveling due to the fact the he was abducted by aliens known as the Tralfamadorians. Since Billy has been through so many time periods and knows how certain situations turn out he is very content with his life and is fearless. Billy tries to tell his family and the world about this experience; but of course, no one believes him. Other characters are very minor and only come out when Billy is in a certain time period. He was married to a woman named Valencia

because he never knows what part of his life he is going to act in next” (22). Billy experiences extreme suffering in many moments and finds himself constantly helpless because of his mental state. This causes the audience to feel sympathy for Billy, and disgust towards what causes his suffering, which is the war. Vonnegut manipulates the audience’s feelings towards war regarding Billy Pilgrim’s insanity as well as through Edgar Derby’s doomed fate.

The main theme of the story is that our bodies can only take a certain amount of pain and when the pain exceed it depends on us whether we should kill ourselves or go through the pain like a boss. Another important message that the author wants to deliver to us is that we should not spend our time thinking of taking revenge from the people that destroyed our lives, but we should just forgive them and enjoy our lives.

In Vonnegut’s best-selling novel entitled Slaughterhouse-five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, he displays his antiwar agenda through illuminating the absurdity of war, in combination with the disastrous effects that just such a war has upon the people who fight in it. Within the novel, we become acquainted with the character Billy Pilgrim, who as literary Critique Fatma Diwany states, despite “being neither mentally nor physically fit to be a soldier … find[s] himself drafted for military service in the second world war, taken as a POW, and witnessing a massacre that leads him to a partial loss of control over his mind” (Diwany 86). After returning home from war his mental instability manifests itself through his lost sense of time.