Slaughterhouse Five, By Billy Pilgrim

     Most of the book is the narrative from Billy Pilgrim a unique character who has the ability to become “unstuck in time”,

Billy is human, and he believes what the Tralfamadorians teach. Some may argue that a human, receiving information from super intelligent aliens, may cause insanity, and that no human is meant to live in four dimensions. Billy Pilgrim handles this

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 reason, behind the readers of Slaughterhouse-five, believing that Billy had become “unstuck in time” was simply the way he moved back and fourth in time. But as the reader reads on, Billy’s illusions become stranger. For example he believes that he is taken the night of his daughters wedding to a different planet with the Tralfamadorians. It all begins for this part of time travelling when he could not

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

In Slaughterhouse Five, Earth is a grim, war torn place. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is haunted by the war throughout the novel. Billy experiences some parts of his past during the war, because of this, events happen simultaneously, outside of the constraints of time. After the war, Billy has a “mild nervous collapse”. His nervous breakdown shows the chaos Earth represents for him. In one scene, Billy is in the middle of a conversation, and a split second later he has finished that conversation and is watching Cinderella (98). The moments in between are wiped from his memory. This scene intensifies the chaos both Billy and the reader associate with Earth. The author enhances the chaotic nature of Earth by changing location on Earth with no warning. At one moment, Billy is honeymooning in Cape Ann, then he’s on a train in 1944, and seconds later he’s back in the war (126-127). Vonnegut does this to clearly show the chaos that is Earth. After Billy returns from Tralfamadore, he sees that the things he learned there were true. Earth

There are two main sides to the argument of his mind. One side believes that Billy Pilgrim can actually time trip and can actually relive every event in his life at any point. The other side believes Pilgrim is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). They believe that there are different things that trigger these memories. I partly believe the latter theory. Billy Pilgrim is suffering from PTSD, but that is not the only thing affecting his mind and causing him to be sent to a hospital or the only thing causing his flashbacks. Kevin Brown in his critique, The Psychiatrists Were Right: Anomic Alienation in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, has some thoughts about why Pilgrim’s PTSD is at the point that it is at. Brown explains that, “Yet just as mainstream American society does not provide an atmosphere conducive to recovery from the horrors of war, the psychiatric establishment also fails Billy” (Brown 101). This thought is very intriguing because Billy Pilgrim may be getting a lack of counseling that is causing his flashbacks and his triggers to overtake his mind so much that his brain is getting damaged. This also may be the influence for his experience or stories about the Tralfamadorians. He may be in such a bad mental state that he is mixing up books that he reads with real things that are happening in his

Billy’s post traumatic experience has affected his life so extensively that in the novel itself it mentions that “science fiction became the only sort of tales he could read” as it was the furthest thing away from reality and what he had experienced throughout the war. From this, I thought Billy believed that anything was possible as reading science fiction was him unconsciously distancing himself from what happened in the war, leaving behind hopes and dreams that he could accomplish. Kilgore Trout’s book called ‘The Gospel from Outer Space’ may have contributed to Billy’s time travels as the novel mentions it is “shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian”. The trauma and devastation of the war have had such a huge impact on Billy that it has affected his life both physically and mentally. McGinnis states that he “does go on, largely through the aid of his Tralfamadorian fiction” by a means of escaping reality. From this, I believe that Billy is suffering from post-traumatic stress as science fiction became the only books that he could read due to the effects of the war

the conflict of this novel is man vs. self. Billy Pilgrim is reliving moments in his life as he has trouble trying to understand the senseless murder and slaughter that World War II was known to be. Supported by the text in chapter 2, “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

It’s pretty crazy to summarize the whole novel because during this time Billy is alternating traveling back and forward through time making everything happen all at once. The story kicks off with the narrator who is also the author Kurt Vonnegut introducing the main character Billy Pilgrim who is studying to be an

As we watch Billy's life unfold through these series of glimpses into his world, a picture begins to emerge of a man whose traumatic experience during World War II has greatly influenced the rest of his existence. The horrors of war have given Billy a unique perspective on human nature and he doesn't like what he sees.

In Slaughterhouse Five, chapter two opens up to the main character, Billy Pilgrim, stuck in time. During the story, it’s been shown as him moving through time, when really they’re flashbacks. The flashbacks periodically go back to when Billy was a young soldier during World War II (WWII) and other traumatic points in his life. Kurt Vonnegut clearly created Billy to show how the psychotic symptoms caused by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects people's way of functioning in their everyday lives. Despite this, the lessons from the story should not be denounced.

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 is the main character of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. In the novel, Billy was bored with life and casually just going along with everything that was going on around him. He was also careless, weird, awkward, he never got angry, was very polite, and was “unstuck in time”. Billy Pilgrim did not have the best family life just like Vonnegut. His dad threw him into the deep end of the pool trying to teach him to swim by using the “swim or drown” method, his parents brought him to the edge of the grand canyon where he almost