Throughout slaughterhouse five Billy Pilgrim lives a metaphorical life that exhibits the destructiveness of war, destroys the concept of time and death. Kurt tells his war experience through the fictional life of Billy Pilgrim who has come unstuck in time. Billy is unstuck in time because he was dragged through life in a way that had no sequence.
The point of view of my novel is omniscient, since the author is both the narrator and part of the story. Long story short, Billy enlist in the war because he is drafted and is needed to fight in the european front. He then maneges to get captured by the Germans and becomes a prisoner of war(POW). This is where he meets some “war buddies” like Roland Weary and Paul Lazzaro. I say it like this because
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As an archetype that describes Billy is that, he is a skinny white male, who is weak and super tall. He is also a guy who can't stand up for himself and has everyone walk over him. He also gives direct characterization of Billy “Last came Billy Pilgrim, empty handed, bleakly ready for death”(Pg 41). He is also manifested as wearing military clothing that is too big for him and very dirty “He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo”(Pg 42). He was also described as a weird fellow “And then they saw bearded Billy Pilgrim in his blue toga and silver boots, with his hands in a muff”(Pg 191). Another archetype is that of Roland Weary your typical bully, he was a fellow war buddy of Billy and he always was picking on Billy “He has been saving Billy's life for ays, cursing him, kicking him, slapping him, making him more” (Pg 43). Roland was the antagonist on that story, but so were the Germans. The protagonist is Billy, he is no hero and he certainly has no hero qualities but he is someone who doesn't like war. The antagonist are Roland, Paul, and the …show more content…
Billy read a book from the tralfamadorians and it was set up this way, each star has its own meaning making it more special. Billy's story is not in the right time order, demonstrating the concepts of time that the tralfamadorians taught Billy. They also taught him the concept “So it goes” which is a phrase h\used when someone dies, because it will continue to happen it will go on. There is no beginning, no middle and no end. His style of writing is explicit, he combines the reality of war and science fiction, aliens and time concepts. A theme is destructiveness of war and the concept of death, time itslef, people whom you love die in the worst times. Some imagery conecting to the theme is “Billy got out of bed in the moonlight he felt spooky and luminous, felt as though he were wrapped in cool fur that full of static electricity”(Pg 91) it connects to theme of time. This is before he was abducted, he knew it was coming and so he had time think but the why came later “ Why me? That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Yes. Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no
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.
It makes it difficult to know what time is his “present”. While the narrator wants us to think that Billy is actually time traveling, there is actually evidence that these episode are really PTSD flashbacks. By pretending Billy is time traveling, though, the narrator gives us a first person perspective of how war and PTSD affect people. The episodes are so realistic that Billy believes he is time traveling. Billy’s first episode occurs in the second chapter while he is on the run with Roland Weary and the two scouts, “his attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light” (pg.54). This is a powerful anti-war message because it show the terrible effect of war on an
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
This kinship can further connect Billy and Vonnegut together. Since Vonnegut is a fourth generation German, it is possible that Vonnegut could also have a cousin that was a Nazi soldier (Biography). Though it may be a far stretch, a further connection the two have is the name of their hometowns. Billy was from the town of Illium, Illinois and Vonnegut was from Indianapolis, Indiana. The correlation between the two cannot be ignored. Billy could very easily be a way for Vonnegut to show the emotions that he felt during the war to the rest of the world.
With this description, Vonnegut vastly distances Billy from the ideal, strong and mighty image of a soldier, yet Billy is a soldier nonetheless. Not only is this weak and ungracious character fighting and representing the honour of his country but also he is one of the few soldiers who survive the war; he outlives many of the other soldiers that could be considered better suited for war. Furthermore, Vonnegut compares Billy to a filthy flamingo, highlighting the distance that exists between society's soldier ideal, graceful and admirable, and the soldiers' reality, harsh and rampageous. In short, Billy is so far from what is expected that he “shouldn't even be in the Army” (51). However, Billy is not the only soldier in this ludicrous predicament. Vonnegut describes the entire Army as chaotic, confused and ludicrous:
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.
During his stay at mental hospital he would bed next to a former infantry captain, Eliot Rosewater, where Rosewater would introduce him to the science novelist Kilgore Trout. Through the stories by Trout, Billy read about aliens and time traveling. From these ideas, influenced by Trout, Billy was able to make up his own stories and correlate them to his personal war experiences.
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
Billy’s travels with the aliens come randomly during his time-traveling spells bring about different insights and lessons that readers can get and put into their everyday lives. For example, on the night Billy is kidnapped by the Tramalfadorians, he asks a simple question that anyone in his position would ask: “Why me?” The Tramalfadorians respond to him in a way that seems bizarre for humans to think about, saying that there is no why and that the moment just is and that all of them are trapped in that moment. The aliens basically tell Billy and the readers that time does not matter in life, and that the most important thing to worry about when dealing with time is the moment that is happening right now, not the past or the future.
The story of Slaughterhouse Five is about a man named Billy Pilgrim who goes through a series of strange events throughout his life time. And it all starts when he is in a war in Germany. Billy is resentful towards the war and he makes it clear that he does not want to be there. During the war, he becomes captured by Germans. Before Billy is captured, he meets Roland Weary. When captured, the Germans took everything from Weary, including his shoes so they gave him clogs as a substitute. Eventually, he dies from gangrene caused by the clogs. Right before Weary dies, he manages to convince another soldier; Paul Lazzaro that it was Billy’s fault that he was dying so Lazzaro vows to avenge the death of Weary by killing Billy.
Moments in Billy's life change instantaneously, not giving Billy a clue to where he will end up next. In one moment, he is sitting in his home typing a letter to the local newspaper about his experience with the Tralfamadorians, and in the next he is a lost soldier of World War II running around behind German lines aimlessly without a coat or proper shoes. He then became a child being thrown into a pool by his father and afterwards a forty-one year old man visiting his mother in an old people's home. In the novel, changes in time are made through transitional statements such as, "Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a jade green mechanical owl." p.56 In the movie there is no such thing and different moments in Billy's life happen instantaneously. Because scenes are continuous as times change, the movie better displays the author's attempt to capture in the notion of being "unstuck in time." On the other hand, the novel does help the audience follow these time changes better by setting it up for the next scene, offering a background of Billy's experiences before they begin through these transitional statements.
Kurt Vonnegut, the narrator, creates Billy Pilgrim as himself. Mr. Vonnegut went through the war himself and is the main character of this story. However, he has named the main character as Billy Pilgrim simply to be able to write about the events he has been through easier than what it would be if he were writing it directly as him. It is a way of making the story like seem a little bit more of a story.
But ignoring death and its suffering is exactly what Billy should not be doing, Vonnegut suggests. To do so makes him, like the Tralfamadorians, alien and inhuman. He has no sense of his own mortality, an awareness he needs in order to understand that, as Stephen Marten has observed, "life is valuable not because it is infinite but because it is so scarce" (11).
In the war Billy experienced many things that a regular person did not. Falling bombs, gunshots, he was dead people, and many more disguisting things. Because of all of this we can conclude that Billy has a PTSD, fully known as post traumatic stress disorder. Billy went through the Bombing of Dresden, where Dresden was obliterated by Allied forces where 135 000 people died. Billy is a prisoner of war who in order to survive the war has to travel through time and escape the reality. Time travelling makes Billy comfortable, and relieves him of troubles he is experiencing at the moment. Billy’s first time traveling happened during the Battle of Bulge when he and three other Americans are captured by German troops. “Billy Pilgrim had stopped in the forest. He was leaning against a tree with his eyes closed. His head was tilted back and his nostrils were flaring. He was like a poet in the Parthenon. This was when Billy first came unstuck in time. His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn't anybody else there, or anything. There was just violet light—and a hum.” (43) This qoute shows us how Billy Started time travelling. When Billy gets captured he uses time travel to travel to happy times when he becomes a good optometrist and marrying his wife that he did not like. When Billy is in the boxcar instead of facing the reality, he travels to Trafalmadore, and that helps him go through this hard situation. Vonnegut also claims that Billy does not control his time travel. “Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” (23).
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.