Mental Illness In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Many argue that Billy is completely insane. Their position may include the fact that Billy never mentioned the planet Tralfamadore before he got into the plane crash. This is a great point because an event such a plane crash could very well leave

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.

The Tralfamadorians, who explain this nature of time and existence to Billy, are shown as enlightened creatures while the humans back on earth are seen as backwards -- to such an extent that they believe in free will. Billy towards the end of his life becomes a preacher of these virtues of existence taught to him by his zookeepers on Tralfamadore, going around and speaking about his experiences and his acquired knowledge. This is ironic, because he is attempting to reverse the steady path of life, even time itself.

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.

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.

More of the time travels Billy has take him to his time on the planet Tralfamadore. Billy says that the aliens abducted him on his daughter's wedding night and returned him a few milliseconds later, but actually spend many months on Tralfamadore because the Tralfamadorians can also see in the fourth dimension, time, which allowed them to keep Billy for what seemed like longer than what he was actually there. While on Tralfamadore, Billy learns to accept his life as it is dealt to him because nothing that happens to you damages you forever. Since time is relative, and your life is like a mountain range, your death ,birth, and all the events in between are nothing more than peaks in a range of mountains, irremovable and able to be visited numerous times.

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

Since the first time Billy claimed to have come unstuck in time while in the forest leaning against a tree, he has depended on an alternate reality in which he has created a new life for himself to avoid thoughts of the horrific events he witnessed while in Dresden. Although Billy claims that he was abducted by the Tralfamadorians, in reality, he was captured by the Germans. The reason that the Tralfamadorians exist is so that Billy can escape from the harsh reality of being a prisoner of war. Although separate in Billy’s conscience, the Nazis and the Tralfamadorians are interchangeable. Billy’s adventures on Tralfamadore all have significant and undeniable connections to his life:

Many people returned from World War II with disturbing images forever stuck in their heads. Others returned and went crazy due to the many hardships and terrors faced. The protagonist in Slaughter-House Five, Billy Pilgrim, has to deal with some of these things along with many other complications in his life. Slaughter House Five (1968), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is an anti-war novel about a man’s life before, after and during the time he spent fighting in World War II. While Billy is trying to escape from behind enemy lines, he is captured and imprisoned in a German slaughterhouse. The author tells of Billy’s terrible experiences there. After the war, Billy marries and goes to school to

During the war, many Vets were exposed to a lot of stress, confusion, anxiety, pain, and hatred. Many killed children for the sake of winning the war, which many Vets felt like criminals. When the vets were sent back home with no readjustment to the lifestyle nor deprogramming of what was learned from the military. Having the mentality of psychopathic killer with no morals or control over aggression. As a result, this terrifying scenarios affected American Veteran having no solution or cure. In the novel, Rosewater and Billy had similar crisis, in which both thought life was meaningless. “Rosewater shot a fourteen year old fireman mistaking me for a German Soldier. Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history”. Billy seems not to ever have a normal timeline where he can explain from a child to a young adult, and so on, but rather have a constant flashbacks from his past coming back to reality to a fictional life. For instance “ A Siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War Three at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon”, the siren was simply a firehouse across the street, which Billy triggered into his past reliving his horrific trauma symptoms of PTSD. Within Billy’s Trauma he is pertuated from his past within any sort of noise, smell, or event. In the train as they travel everyone was exhausted

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:

Once Billy becomes capable of time travel and comes into contact with the Tralfamadorians, he simply goes through the motions of life but avoids falling into a defeatist attitude. Under the tutelage of the Tralfamadorians, Billy fashions a brand new perspective towards society and enhances his natural persona, “When Billy accepts the Tralfamadorian philosophy, the passivity that he has displayed his entire life—from wanting to drift quietly at the bottom of the YMCA pool after his father throws him in, to begging Roland Weary to leave him behind—is justified. If the future cannot be changed anyway, why even try?” (Farrell 9). Though the interaction with the Tralfamadorians seems to allow Billy an outlet to construct his own ideals upon the universe, he nonetheless continues along the same path as before. Billy becomes an extremist towards passivity in life rather than utilizing the experience to impart a strong impression

When he tells Billy that he needs to figure it out and snap out of it, Billy says, “ You guys go on without me. I’m all right” (Vonnegut 47). This just displays the hopelessness in Billy’s life. The war has driven him to lose touch with himself and not value his own life. This makes it very easy for a reader to feel empathy for Billy and get an idea of how war can really affect these men. Billy isn’t the only character that Vonnegut uses to depict the terrors of war.

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.