Essay On Symbolism In Slaughterhouse Five

          Billy didn’t want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her so take the diamond ring and be his companion for life.

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.

 Kurt Vonnegut's uses many images to enhance the overall effect of Slaughterhouse- Five. Throughout the novel, in both war scenes and in the protagonist's travels back and forward in time, the many images produce a believable story of the unusual life of Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut uses color imagery, repetitive images, and images of pain and suffering to develop the novel and create situations that the reader can accept and comprehend.

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:

Billy Pilgrim is born in 1922 and grows up in Ilium, New York. A funny-looking, weak youth, he does well in high school, then he enrolls in night classes at the Ilium School of Optometry, and is soon drafted into the army. He serves as a chaplain's assistant, is sent into the Battle of the Bulge, and almost gets taken prisoner by the Germans. Just before being captured he first becomes unstuck in time. He sees the entirety of his life in one sweep. Billy is transported with other privates to the beautiful city of Dresden. There the prisoners are made to work for their keep. They are kept in a former slaughterhouse. Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight meat locker. They emerge to find a moonscape of

It is hard for Billy to find tranquility since he consistently have thoughts and feelings that remind him of his traumatic events. In chapter four, Billy couldn’t sleep on the day of his daughter’s wedding, since “There was a full moon”(Vonnegut 72), a piece of imagery that Vonnegut uses, frequently, as a comparison to the fire-bombing of Dresden, just to yet again show that Billy Pilgrim is thinking of horrific event, disturbing his day to day life. Sometimes a victim of PTSD will fall into the habit of drinking, especially when reminded of the traumatic event. As for Billy, when he heard the phone ring,

When the Germans first capture Billy he asks them “Why me?”, to which they respond with “Vy you? Vy anybody?”. Similarly, when Billy dreams that the Tralfalmadorians abduct him, he again asks, “Why me?”. The Tralfalmadorians reply saying, “Why you…. Why anything?”. This strong parallel between Billy’s real life experiences and his dreams reinforce the idea that his mind is trying to create a world he would rather live in. It is easier for Billy to pretend that aliens said these words to him rather than a German guard who knock out two of Billy’s

Sections of Vonnegut’s novel take place during World War II: the bloodiest war ever fought. The story follows Billy Pilgrim, a young man who is forced to fight overseas despite the rough conditions he will face. Billy joins his regiment as “it [is] in the process of being destroyed by Germans” (Vonnegut 40), and Vonnegut’s description of Billy accentuates his lack of preparation. He is given very little combat training, ill-fitting clothes, and is not even supplied with a firearm (Vonnegut 41). From the beginning, Billy is isolated from the other troops in a way because he is not as well prepared as the others. During a scouting mission after the devastating Battle of the Bulge, Billy is separated from his group and left with another scout, Roland Weary. This is when Billy’s physical isolation begins, chronologically speaking. Billy and Roland inadvertently separate themselves from their squadron and begin to wander around behind enemy lines. Unlike Roland, however, Billy seems to

As said by Susan Vee-Gulani, "Vonnegut's writing of Slaughterhouse Five can be seen as a therapeutic process that allows him to uncover and deal with his trauma" (Vee-Gulani). What he lived caused his conditions to be threatened. He was no longer his regular self. To explain his experience he tells about Billy Pilgrim and his encounters during the same war. Both went through different experiences but in the end the outcomes were the

Critics often suggest that Kurt Vonnegut’s novels represent a man’s desperate, yet, futile search for meaning in a senseless existence.  Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, displays this theme.  Kurt Vonnegut uses a narrator, which is different from the main character.  He uses this technique for several reasons.

When a person is sent to a war of any kind it causes some mental problem. They would have trauma and have an illusion of all sorts. In the novel, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut shows references of the main character Billy Pilgrim traveling through time and being abduct by aliens. Throughout the stories Billy has experiences what it seem like trauma because there are many moments where it made no sense. Vonnegut use the science-fiction to explain Billy’s experiences and that’s how Billy deal with his traumatic episodes.

Through Slaughter House Five, Kurt Vonnegut shows how war affects the individual. For Billy Pilgrim this means to go insane and imagine aliens have abducted him, forced him to be a zoo exhibit, and allowed him to impregnate a porn star. There are countless movies, books, and speeches that show war in a positive light. They claim that war is essential, purposeful, and an honorable thing for every man to do. However, this novel claims that not only war yields no great purpose and is self-destructive, but it also destroys anyone who might partake in it. Billy Pilgrim, who represents the average person, is ruined by his short time in war and has to then completely reconstruct his sense of reality. When Pilgrim walks out of the slaughter house for the first time after the bombing of the

War is one of , if not the most horrific entity a person can experience. It can cause a person to have a mental breakdown in the middle of the battlefield by the cause that they cannot bear seeing close friends killed in action. As a result of seeing friends die, multiple soldiers can begin to feel alienated. The soldiers commence to lose friends whom they have grown to trust, and therefore start to accumulate their feelings inside. The soldiers commence to feel lonely and lose their mentality. Alienation and War are two things that are unquestionably different, yet also similar and in Slaughterhouse Five it shows.

Billy survived the bombing of Dresden, Germany. “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” Slaughterhouse-five (22). He is taken by the flying saucers to the planet Tralfamadore on his wedding night, for their zoo. Billy Pilgrims’s timeline is a ‘wibbly wobbly’ mess of events, for reasons like that, many question his sanity. But what makes a person sane? Sane: having a healthy mind, able to think normally. War can mess with a person’s head; Billy has been in extreme situations, his actions don’t make him any less sane.

During the dialogue between Wild Bob and Billy it is important to note the act of turn taking. As Billy withholds participation, Bob is forced to speak again, meaning that turn taking is not fulfilled here. This gives the impression that Billy is a weak character who isn’t really aware of the situation and appears to have little knowledge about the topic. ‘Billy couldn’t remember the outfit he was from’ (Vonnegut 1969: 55).