Disillusionment 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

     Critics of Kurt Vonnegut’s are unable to agree on what the main theme of his novel Slaughterhouse Five may be. Although Vonnegut’s novels are satirical, ironical, and extremely wise, they have almost no plot structure, so it is hard to find a constant theme. From the many people that the main character Billy Pilgrim meets, and the places that he takes us, readers are able to discern that Vonnegut is trying to send the message that there will always be death, there will always be war, and humans have no control over their own lives.

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 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.

People react differently to tragedies: some mourn, some speak up, and some avoid the sorrow. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut suggests the danger and inhumanity of turning away from the discomfort by introducing Billy Pilgrim as someone who is badly affected by the aftermath of the Dresden bombing, and the Tralfamadorians as the aliens who provide an easy solution to Billy. It is simpler to avoid something as tragic as death, but Vonnegut stresses the importance of confronting it. Vonnegut, like many artists, expresses his ideas through his creations. The significance of art is not confined to helping and inspiring the general public; the process of creating art also becomes another form of coping mechanism for artists.

It is expected for arguments to arise when writing about controversial topics. Many times the meaning of a book is not as obvious as the author intended, which may lead to problems. Other times, books are challenged because they contain sexual or inappropriate material. When Kurt Vonnegut released Slaughterhouse-Five critics were quick to judge his peculiar way of writing. Although Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five was oftentimes misunderstood, interpreted as inappropriate, and judged for the peculiar point of view, critics seem to appreciate and accept one aspect of it: the structure of the book.

“Fate is a misconception, it's only a cover-up for the fact you don't have control over your own life.” –Anonymous. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-five, an optometrist named Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time uncontrollably and constantly travels between his past, present, and future. Since Pilgrim is unable to control his time warps, he is forced to re-live agonizing moments such as watching his wartime friend Edgar Derby executed for stealing or going through the Dresden bombing repeatedly. However, he is also able to visit pleasant moments like speaking as president in front of the Lions club or his honeymoon with his wife, Valencia. Vonnegut’s use of repetition and vision of war, time and death are crucial to Pilgrim as he

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 would one feel if he woke up one morning and couldn’t decipher what was real and what was his imagination? He would feel confused. But how would people react if he confused his imagination with reality? They would suspect that he is going crazy. This is actually quite similar to the character Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse- Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Billy was a prisoner of war and witnessed the bombing of Dresden. After what he had witnessed, Billy shows signs of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder throughout the novel. He had trouble sleeping, he had nightmares, and he was constantly looking back at time and reliving the trauma he faced. According to the article Who Develops Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, “the effects of extreme stress has a long history, primarily focused on the effects of war” (Ozer and Weiss 1). One can assume that Billy developed PTSD after the war because of the way he acted. After seeing so many deaths from the war, Billy no longer has emotions towards death and sadness. By witnessing these horrible deaths and the bombing of Dresden, nothing seems horrific to Billy anymore. He shows no emotion when someone dies. He then confuses his life with science fiction novels and people begin to think he’s going crazy. After the war, his life was never the same. Ultimately, Billy Pilgrim is unable to live a normal life due to his traumatic memories from the war.

This kind-of off the wall opinion can be interpreted as people being physically stuck in this world, that people don't have any choice over what mankind as a whole, do and what people head for. The only thing one can do is think about everything, but it won't affect anything. This idea appears many times throughout the novel. This is one of the examples, when Billy proposes marriage to Valencia:

The phrase “so it goes” is repeated 106 times in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. From “dead” champagne to the massacre at Dresden, every death in the book is seemingly equalized with the phrase “so it goes”. The continuation of this phrase ties in with the general theme on indifference in the story. If the Tralfamadorian view of time is correct, then everyone is continuously living every moment of their life and dying is not the end. However, if Vonnegut believed in this idea, then he wouldn’t have felt compelled to write about the firebombing of Dresden. It is clear that both Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut are affected by the massacre they saw, but they have different ways of rationalizing it. Billy finds comfort in the Tralfamadorian view of life, whereas Vonnegut disagrees, and urges the reader to disagree too. The constant repetition of “so it goes” breaks the reader away from the Tralfamadorian point of view, and allows them to come to their own conclusion that although it would be nice to forget the bad parts of life, it is important to remember all of the past. Vonnegut helps the reader come to this conclusion by repeating the phrase after gruesome moments, and showing how meaningless life can be if the Tralfamadorian ideas are believed, as seen through Billy Pilgrim’s bland life..

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.

Baruch Spinoza once said “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He compared free-will with destiny and ended up that what we live and what we think are all results of our destiny; and the concept of the free-will as humanity know is just the awareness of the situation. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores this struggle between free-will and destiny, and illustrates the idea of time in order to demonstrate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut conveys this through irony, symbolism and satire.

Slaughterhouse-five strives to remember the tragedy of the bombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut constructs his novel around a main character who becomes “unstuck in time” (23). Billy Pilgrim’s life is told out of order, which gives him a different perspective than the rest of the world. Billy lives through his memories, and revisits events in his life at random times and without warning. Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim to the Tralfamadorian way of thinking about memory and time so that he can cope with being unstuck in time. The Tralfamadorian ideology is set up as an alternative to the human ideology of life. In the novel Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut constructs a reality where memory is unproductive through the Tralfamadorian