Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

The central conflict of this book is Billy coming to terms with the unfortunate events happening around him, and facing this character versus world scenario of everything and everyone always being against him in some way or another. Billy sees so much suffering and so much death. He is blamed for the death of Ronald Weary, which is not his fault. He witnesses the Dresden Firebombing, and has an overall uneventful blain life to begin with. Billy needs to find a way to cope with this unbearable pressure, and whether or not the Tralmalfadorians are real, their message is real to Billy. The philosophy they present is the excuse Billy needs to justify all the wrong he sees around him. The Tralmalfadorian belief being that there is no free will, and that you timeline is fact, and that you simply experience death, but continue “existing” afterwards. Essentially, you always exist and what happens to you is predetermined fate. This allows Billy to pass on all of the death and misery around him as meant to be. He can rest assured knowing that there is nothing he could about anything in the past, present, or future. There was nothing he could have done or can do to stop the death and torture, weather it is the death of his wife, the firebombing in Dresden, or even his own death. This motivation-less philosophy is his resolution to his devastating conflict, and is directly responsible for his lack of action throughout the story.

… Disorientation and confusion“ ("Trauma/PTSD"). Vonnegut writes, in one of the very first chapters, “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day” (Vonnegut 23). Throughout the book we are taken on a spastic and wild journey from one moment in Pilgrim’s life to another. For instance, Pilgrim is walking through the horribly cold, bleak and depressing German landscape with “The Three Musketeers” and ends up being dragged by Weary most of the way. As soon as the two scouts ditch him and Weary and it seems their ordeal couldn’t get any worse, Pilgrim “time travels” to a moment in which he has just won the Presidency of The Lion’s Club and proceeds to gives an impressive speech. (Vonnegut 48-50). This sort of behavior, completely dissociating oneself from the horrible situation at hand, is typical of PTSD. Pilgrim wanted to escape completely from the cold and depressing “hell” he was in and be back in happiness, where he had just won a successful campaign for the Presidency of his club. This is what happens throughout the book and it is simply another example of Pilgrim’s widespread and horribly debilitating case of PTSD.

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

In the novel, Billy Pilgrim experiences things in his life he can’t control and he doesn’t feel comfortable in those situations. One of those experiences is when Billy is drafted for World War II. He obviously doesn’t want this because he has to give up his career as an eye doctor. When Billy goes into the war he is a chaplains assistant. This displays how he is not equipped with what he needs to fight and survive in the war; however, he does survive. The other soldiers that are fighting with the proper equipment end up getting killed. This situation in Billy’s life is significant because it shows his fate and how he doesn’t have free will to decide on his own. Against Billy’s will he went to war and survived when he shouldn’t have. Billy couldn’t

The Slaughterhouse Five novel, is a fictional and nonfictional delight all clashed into one. The author, Kurt Vonnegut, amazingly combines a fictional character’s life with the nonfictional influence of what Kurt himself had experienced. As well as major topics being debated on and dealt with today. Billy Pilgrim takes hold of the story’s main protagonist as a prisoner of war during the Dresden raids in eastern Germany. While reading, I found many relationships in the novel to common concerns, such as time and death; too correlated opinions from other anti-war enthusiasts.

The anti-war message is upheld further with the ironies that Vonnegut provides in the book. One example is "when one of the soldiers, a POW, survives the fire-bombing, but dies afterward from the dry heaves because he has to bury dead bodies" (Vit). When Billy and one of his comrades join to other scouts the Vonnegut portrays as well trained, Vonnegut displays irony by killing the skillful scouts and allows the less competent Pilgrim and Roland to survive. Roland does eventually die because he is forced to walk around in wooden clogs that turn his feet to pudding. The greatest example of irony is seen in what Vonnegut claims to be the climax of the story. He explains the situation before the story even begins. He is referring to the:

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is, as suggested by the title, a novel describing a crusade that stretches beyond the faint boundaries of fiction and crosses over into the depths of defogged reality. This satirical, anti-war piece of literature aims to expose, broadcast and even taunt human ideals that support war and challenge them in light of their folly. However, the reality of war, the destruction, affliction and trauma it encompasses, can only be humanly described by the word “war” itself. Furthermore, oftentimes this term can only be truly understood by those who have experienced it firsthand. Therefore, in order to explain the unexplainable and humanize one of the most

We all wish we could travel through time, going back to correct our stupid mistakes or zooming ahead to see the future. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, however, time travel does not seem so helpful. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's main character, has come unstuck in time. He bounces back and forth between his past, present, and future lives in a roller coaster time trip that proves both senseless and numbing. Examining Billy's time traveling, his life on Tralfamadore, and the novel's schizophrenic structure shows that time travel is actually a metaphor for our human tendency to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of death.

The reason being is Billy is coming to terms with his involvement in World War II. He isn’t sure why he had to be drafted, why people around him had to die, why he was treated so poorly by others, or why he had to end up unhappy at the end of his life. It’s where the motif from the novel “So it goes.” comes from and that Billy picks up on. There is no why, everything simply is as it has to be.

Through Billy the author is able to reveal to us that we have control over our destiny. How you choose to react to certain situations determines our future. There is nothing else stopping you from living a happy life but

(Vonnegut, Kurt 1) The events of war are forever with Pilgrim but he tries to use the book as a way to vent and talk about what happened. Throughout the writing process, which took so long due to procrastination and avoidance of dealing with the events of the war, Pilgrim meets with old war buddies and their families. Most notably, he reunites with his friend Bernard V. O’Hare and meets his family. Bernard still has night terrors about the war but refrains from talking about it.

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.

Throughout the novel, Vonnegut uses different characters to display his anti-war feelings and show how many innocent victims end up being casualties in a war. In order to display this effectively, he uses Edgar Derby as an example. Edgar Derby was a high school teacher that willingly left his career to fight in the war. He was much older then most of then most of the men he was serving with including his son who was also fighting in the war. Derby was also one of the soldiers that experienced the firebombing in Dresden with Billy. After the bombing occurred Derby and the others were sifting through the damage and he picked up a teapot. Later on in the book Derby is arrested for stealing this simplistic item and is sentenced to death by firing squad. This really bothered Billy because he saw an innocent man that he was friends with get killed for a teapot. Some can argue that this is just an aspect of war that soldiers need

It’s a terrifying thing to go off to a war when he didn’t want to be apart of. He went from the bliss of getting an education to the tramzinge effect of wart. People cope with terrifying things in many ways. Vonnegut wrote about Billy Pilgrim as a way to tell his

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