Summary Of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

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 design of this novel was structured from Kurt Vonnegut’s own World War II experiences. The one experience that seemed to stand out the most in the novel was the Dresden air raids. Vonnegut saw the air raids as senseless, so every time Vonnegut is describing the raids in the novel we see a distinct pattern, Vonnegut uses his novel to depict to the reader a feel of senselessness every time the bombing is mentioned. As a witness to the destruction, Billy confronts fundamental questions about the meanings of life and death. Traumatized by the events in Dresden, Billy is still left lost with no answers. Although his life as a working family man is considerably satisfying, he is unable to find peace of mind because of the trauma he suffered in Dresden. (Vonnegut,

They could always visit him or her with the use of time travel when he or she was alive. Because the phrase was very often repeated, it somewhat served as a tally to show how frequently death occurs and just how inevitable it is. Billy knew the exact date of his death and how it would happen, but he could not alter it and was no longer afraid of dying, so it had no effect on him because “there is no why[,]” it just “simply is” (77; ch4). He learned this from the Tralfamadorians.

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.

In the quotation above, Billy says that he can time-travel by simply blinking. I have been alive for sixteen years now, and have not met a human or heard of anyone who can do anything like this, so one can infer that Billy cannot have an acceptable mental health. Billy Pilgrim also says that he knows all of the details of his death, and has a designated place for them in the next quote. “As a time-traveler, he has seen his own death many times,

War, among its many characteristics, is a destructive force towards the morale of its participants. It taints the innocence of young men, and will remain a constant in their lives. Like a scar or a disability, war is a perpetual reminder that affects every part in the lives of soldiers. In the novel, Slaughterhouse-Five written by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim has become a side effect of the Dresden bombing. He is has become mentally fragmented through his inability to experience time in a linear format, keep his mental stability and live peacefully in reality.

The novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut revolves around the firebombing of Dresden that killed an estimated 135,000 civilians. The annihilation of the city’s population leaves the main character, Billy Pilgrim, feeling hopeless and alone, and this eventually leads to his mental breakdown. Vonnegut exposes the horrors of war through the deterioration of Billy’s sanity and the destruction of the entire city of Dresden.

Kurt Vonnegut reflects his life during World War II as a German prisoner through his character Billy Pilgrim in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. While enlisted in the US Army, Vonnegut had life threatening experiences that were inspiration for his writing. Vonnegut was a young boy during the Great Depression and was raised through the hardships of the time. As a child, Vonnegut’s father worked as an architect, but during the Great Depression, the building industry was brought to a halt and Vonnegut’s father was out of a job. He was out of work for ten years, yet Vonnegut says they had never gone hungry or felt unsafe. Once things started to get worse, Vonnegut’s mother began writing to provide for their family (“Kurt”). Soon Vonnegut enlisted in the US Army, and just one year after that, his mother killed herself. While in Germany, Vonnegut was taken prisoner and put in several prison camps. Since Vonnegut was held prisoner, he experienced the bombing of Dresden firsthand (“Slaughterhouse-Five”). Vonnegut repeatedly reveals that he encountered trouble writing this book because he must explain the tragic things that he experienced (Freese). Vonnegut wrote this story to show how terrible war is in his eyes and he gives his opinion of stopping war through his characters and events that made it interesting to readers (O’Sullivan).

The conclusion of this analysis as a whole must therefore be that Billy Pilgrim became “unstuck” in time (in his own world) due to the events of which he witnessed and/or participated in during World War II. The horror of what was occurring around him, and due to the confusion he felt during the occurrence of these events, his entire mental state degraded to the point where he became locked in viewing the past over and over indefinitely, and into helping himself believe his delusion that he was often taken from the earth to another strange planet he felt

After Billy survives the massacre in Dresden, he becomes unstuck in time, which presents him with the ability to time travel through all of the events in his life. As Brett Cox explained, “The novel’s ‘short and jumbled and jangled’ structure reflects the condition of its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim.” The trend of quick-shifting plot moments in Slaughterhouse Five not only reflects upon Billy’s insanity, but also provides evidence towards Vonnegut’s emotional stability. An instant of Billy in a German prison camp may be at discussion at one moment, then suddenly the plot would rewind to a previous scene in Billy’s life namely when his father taught him to swim as a child. Additionally, Vonnegut’s time as a prisoner of war during World War II and later witnessing the firebombing of the German city of Dresden signify how his writing and personal beliefs is influenced (Cox). Vonnegut uses his own first-person voice when the narrator pops up throughout Billy’s journeys, but the novel is third-person omniscient for the majority. Later examples in the novel indicate that these hardships may have resulted in the delusions of an emotionally unstable man. Another instance is described when “Billy answered. There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost smell his breath—mustard gas and roses. It was a wrong number. Billy hung up.” (Vonnegut 73). The

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is a powerful novel that showcases the unconventional brutalities of war. As Vonnegut attempts to recount the violence surrounding the bombing of Dresden during World War II, an underlying motif of how the war has affected the lives of soldiers becomes prevalent through Vonnegut’s writing style. The storyline is presented in a nonlinear structure with the main character, Billy Pilgrim, being transported through different timelines and worlds at a moment’s notice. Vonnegut blends this unorganized arrangement with literary techniques such as repetition and dark humor to convey how detached the Pilgrim gets from society as his life progresses after the war. Slaughterhouse five struck a chord with many readers since it was published during the height of the Vietnam War and the atrocities of war were being realized by many, thus leading Vonnegut’s tale to

PTSD Supporting- PTSD is a commonly known anxiety disorder that develops in the brain after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm or threat resulted. Vonnegut used his books as a coping mechanism for himself. In his seventh novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, is the story of about the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, a decidedly non-heroic man who has become "unstuck in time." He travels back and forth in time, visiting all the moments in between repeatedly his birth and death, out of order. The book’s success rose from its ability to offer a little something to everyone. The book was hailed to be one of the most accessible counter cultural event in a very confusing year. The novel is framed by Chapters One and Ten, in which Vonnegut himself talks about the difficulties of writing the novel and the effects of Dresden on his own life. In between, Billy Pilgrim 's life is given to us out of order and in small fragments. Common signs of PTSD are reliving the event through upsetting thoughts, flashbacks, or having very strong mental and physical reactions if something reminds the person of the event. Feeling that one can never relax and must be on guard all the time to protect oneself, trouble sleeping, feeling irritable, overreacting when startled, angry outbursts or trouble concentrating.

Kurt Vonnegut takes a different approach to writing a captivating war story that reaches the readers. Slaughterhouse-Five is a strange approach on picturing the horrors of the Dresden bombing, Vonnegut reaches his message across by his odd, unconventional writing style throughout the book. In many ways Vonnegut openly breaks the conventional rules of storytelling by using approaches that are unsuspected and make the reader think. Vonnegut as a writer wanted to change the reader's point of view, through this highly acclaimed novel his weird plot connects to the devastating events that he cannot seem to overpass.

Billy Pilgrim was a fictional representation of the stress caused by the bombing of Dresden, Germany. His experience in World War II destroyed his view on life and destroyed his concept of time. After the bombing, Billy spent most of his life hallucinating about his past. Billy slowly lost his mind and eventually claimed he was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians. These aliens from the fourth dimension helped him cope with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, they also led him deeper into insanity. Slaughterhouse Five was an anti-war book which described how the Dresden bombing led to Billy’s mental decline, his depersonalization from the present, and his view that he could not change what happened to anyone around him.

​Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer, born in Indianapolis, Indiana. His parents, Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and Edith Vonnegut, both studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had two older siblings, Bernard and Alice. He attended Cornell University, along with his siblings. He enlisted in the army while at Cornell, and from there the army transferred him over to Carnegie Institute of Technology and then to the University of Tennessee, in which he studied mechanical engineering. One of his most known works, “Slaughterhouse-Five”, was about a soldier in World War II, much like himself, and the journey’s he goes through after, during, and before the war. Billy Pilgrim, the main character in the story randomly travels through time, and is abducted by aliens who see everything in fourth dimension. Billy was an optometrist, who then was drafted into the military. Billy pilgrim reflects the type of man that Vonnegut is himself. He writes of himself through the fictional character, Billy. It is clear that they both suffer with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.