Billy Pilgrim's Struggle with PTSD in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

The plot of Slaughterhouse- Five revolves around World War Two, especially the bombing of Dresden from a soldier’s perspective. Vonnegut vividly describes the destructive nature of war through accounts of ambush, mistreatment of prisoners of war, and massacres. However, he also expresses the mentally and emotionally damaging effects of war with the pure insanity of Billy Pilgrim. One of many instances illustrating Billy’s altered state of mind in the war is when he arrives in a prisoner of war camp. The English prisoners put on a production of Cinderella for their American guests and following a comical line Billy loses control. “He not only laughed – he shrieked. He went on shrieking until he was carried out of the shed into another, where the hospital was” (Slaughterhouse 98). This is a single example of the deplorable state of Billy’s mental sanity. The reader is already aware that Billy also begins to hallucinate and have crazy notions that he was abducted by aliens. Billy even acquires a sort of catchphrase that clearly demonstrates how emotionally distant Billy has become because of the war. Every time death is brought up, Billy has only one thing to say about it: “So it goes” (Slaughterhouse 214). This shows that Billy has become numb to pain, anguish, fear, and even life itself. To Billy, the end of the war did not actually bring freedom, but trapped him inside the horrors of his memories and deranged

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

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,

The reality in this novel is about how real it is to Billy Pilgrim (Kurt Vonnegut). He is never really time travelling it is just a part of his stage in life that he keeps replaying. Due to the devastation he had to watch it is hard for him to live everyday as a normal person. And again this all relates to PTSD. It is not a given fact that Billy had PTSD, however as you read the novel you understand more about his life and why he is the way he is.

This is considered a symptom of PTSD because he had a hallucination of a traumatic event that he had experienced. Walowick isn’t the only one who feels embarrassed to talk about PTSD episodes. In the article, “T2 Virtual PTSD Experience: A Virtual Worlds Environment to Educate Service Members and Veterans about Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” Hoge states, “Those who screened positive for psychological health problems were twice as likely to report concerns about treatment stigma and barriers” (594). This goes to show many are ashamed to share that they are going through PTSD. Many would feel they will lose their tough guy image.

Billy Pilgrim has become a victim of PTSD after having served in the military during World War Two. Although not officially diagnosed until the 1980s, the mental disorder had been terrorizing its victims throughout history. One will understand Billy Pilgrim inevitably suffers from this disorder when one discovers

Vonnegut reinforces the ideology of the perils or warfare through Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim experiences many hardships during his time throughout World War 2 and his time in Dresden. Billy and his fellow American soldiers endure many hardships such as overcrowding, no food and the weather is to harsh, on their long voyage to the prison camp. Not only was there very little room on the train but no one would let Billy sleep next to them due to Billy’s wild night terrors. This led to Billy having to post himself up in the corner of the stagecoach in order to sleep standing up. “Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner brace, self crucified, holding himself there with a blue and ivory claw hooked over the sill of the ventilator” (Vonnegut 101). This musters up the image that Billy looked like Jesus Christ on the cross which Billy is also compared to during the novel. Upon the trains arrival at the German prison camp, Billy’s attire did not resemble that of an American Soldier. Billy Pilgrim had no shoes or jacket and it was in the middle of the harsh winter. After getting of the train and stepping foot on the cold dead soil of the camp, Jackets are taken from the dead corpses of dead prisoners and given to the so called “newcomers”. The coats are given out in little frozen clumps as if they cant even be worn and it is Billy who receives the smallest and least effective looking coat. “ The coat

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

War is a tragic experience that can motivate people to do many things. Many people have been inspired to write stories, poems, or songs about war. Many of these examples tend to reflect feelings against war. Kurt Vonnegut is no different and his experience with war inspired him to write a series of novels starting with Slaughter-House Five. It is a unique novel expressing Vonnegut's feelings about war. These strong feeling can be seen in the similarities between characters, information about the Tralfamadorians, dark humor, and the structure of the novel.

How are memories recalled? Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction novel Slaughterhouse-five is the story of a man named Billy Pilgrim that was present in Dresden during the bombing in WWII. The story has a non-linear timeline derived from the Tralfamadorians, the alien species that captured Billy, who view time as a jigsaw of temporary situations that aren’t sequential and continue on into infinity. The story is not written in chronological order, but the ideas flow from chapter to chapter, showing how memories are not recalled in the order in which they are created. Vonnegut’s use of repetition and non-chronological time gives insight into the passage of memory and what triggers a recollection.

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.

PTSD Supporting- PTSD is a commonly known anxiety disorder that develops in the brain after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm or threat resulted. Vonnegut used his books as a coping mechanism for himself. In his seventh novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, is the story of about the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, a decidedly non-heroic man who has become "unstuck in time." He travels back and forth in time, visiting all the moments in between repeatedly his birth and death, out of order. The book’s success rose from its ability to offer a little something to everyone. The book was hailed to be one of the most accessible counter cultural event in a very confusing year. The novel is framed by Chapters One and Ten, in which Vonnegut himself talks about the difficulties of writing the novel and the effects of Dresden on his own life. In between, Billy Pilgrim 's life is given to us out of order and in small fragments. Common signs of PTSD are reliving the event through upsetting thoughts, flashbacks, or having very strong mental and physical reactions if something reminds the person of the event. Feeling that one can never relax and must be on guard all the time to protect oneself, trouble sleeping, feeling irritable, overreacting when startled, angry outbursts or trouble concentrating.

Because of his disease, Billy suffers with certain experiences. Yet Billy turns his disturbing thoughts into time travel, and the experiences he has due to his own phenomenon is a sign toward Pilgrim not being able to cope with himself. Pilgrims first experience with time travel was while he was being shot at. At this stage of the book, the storyline had been in chronological order, so in order to manage Pilgrim thinks about the first time he ever experienced true fear, but rather than remembering it as just a memory he correlates it with time travel (Vonnegut 43). Pilgrim never was anticipated of any sort of mental illness before he went into the war, still he comes out of the war beginning to time travel and is put in a mental institution. Once a normal man from Ilium, New York, now is a bystander to his very own life. Pilgrims life seemed to be free of any stability after his first experience with time travel, but without even knowing that the narrative is mainly focusing on him, a of lack of certainty is is felt by those who have encountered war.

George Roy Hill's movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughter-house Five is a fairly accurate version that stays relatively close to Vonnegut's own vision. Throughout Vonnegut novel Billy Pilgrim, a WWII soldier who was captured by the Germans and held captive as an American POW (prisoner of war), demonstrates several extreme compulsive tendencies due to the horrific events he witnessed as an American POW victim. After reading of Billy’s experiences, I did not have faith in the movies ability to accurately present Vonnegut's own personal feelings. On the contrary, after seeing George Hill's movie adaptation of Slaughter-house Five, I felt that the he did an extremely nice job in keeping with what Vonnegut had intended to be seen

Slaughterhouse-Five book is antiwar novel, and it was written by Kurt Vonnegut. The whole story is based on a person Billy Pilgrim, and he is not stuck in time. Billy time traveling and relives various occasions throughout his life. Billy Pilgrim is the main character in this book. The narrator tells us that “Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York, the only child of a barber there. He graduated from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class, and attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military service in the Second World War” (Vonnegut 30). Then, after training he was sent to Germany during the war. Billy acknowledges diverse values and sees horrible and morbid occasions in a different contrast to others. Billy also experiences a lifestyle that is not visible to other people. Many readers would contend that Billy's encounters make him crazy; however, Billy's experiences with the Tralfamadorians (a group extra-terrestrial time travelers) enables him to keep his wisdom and remain an exceptionally clever, intelligent and happy man.