The Slaughterhouse Five Novel By Kurt Vonnegut

In the book SlaughterHouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character is named Billy Pilgrim. Billy has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and experiences his life over and over again and can not stop it. PTSD is a disorder that is caused by a traumatic event that a person has experienced. Billy’s PTSD is present throughout the whole novel. I think Billy’s PTSD is a part of the reason that he is going “through time” and is “unstuck” in time.

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five he talks about many different themes. He quotes, makes fun of, and uses many different themes. I would like to talk about one major theme in Slaughterhouse Five, religion. In the book he uses religion to teach important lessons, he used it as inspiration, and he even pokes fun at religion.

It makes it difficult to know what time is his “present”. While the narrator wants us to think that Billy is actually time traveling, there is actually evidence that these episode are really PTSD flashbacks. By pretending Billy is time traveling, though, the narrator gives us a first person perspective of how war and PTSD affect people. The episodes are so realistic that Billy believes he is time traveling. Billy’s first episode occurs in the second chapter while he is on the run with Roland Weary and the two scouts, “his attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light” (pg.54). This is a powerful anti-war message because it show the terrible effect of war on an

Similarly, “The Nazi claim that Germany was being ‘Judaized’ can hardly be substantiated” as Germany’s Jewish inhabitants in 1933 made up a mere “.80 percent of the total population” (Foster 15).

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.

Billy has lost a sense of love as death has faced him in the eyes once too many. Billy deals with his pain by turning to alcohol abuse, he cannot deal with his mourning, "Sometimes it's not as if they have died so much as that I myself have died and become a ghost." (43). From Dolores and Billy, the central theme is slowly revealed.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut takes places on two contrasting planets. One is Earth, where war tears apart families and minds, and the other is Tralfamadore, where supernatural alien beings share their extended knowledge of the world. Vonnegut uses the two planets, Earth and Tralfamadore, to show the contrasting ideas of chaos and order, and that human actions have limitations that render them helpless against a meaningless universe.

But ignoring death and its suffering is exactly what Billy should not be doing, Vonnegut suggests. To do so makes him, like the Tralfamadorians, alien and inhuman. He has no sense of his own mortality, an awareness he needs in order to understand that, as Stephen Marten has observed, "life is valuable not because it is infinite but because it is so scarce" (11).

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck” in time. The question here is, why? The fact of the matter is that he does not actually begin to time-travel. Billy “becomes unstuck” as a coping mechanism to deal with his traumatic experiences during the war. Billy attempts to reorganize his life’s events and cope with a disorder known as post traumatic stress (PTSD).

Billy and Jonah both have unique insights into the nature of time, consequently, they have resigned themselves to fate; neither of them cares about death or life because they know that they are helpless to change the future. Whenever Jonah recounts a story,

The story of Slaughterhouse Five is about a man named Billy Pilgrim who goes through a series of strange events throughout his life time. And it all starts when he is in a war in Germany. Billy is resentful towards the war and he makes it clear that he does not want to be there. During the war, he becomes captured by Germans. Before Billy is captured, he meets Roland Weary. When captured, the Germans took everything from Weary, including his shoes so they gave him clogs as a substitute. Eventually, he dies from gangrene caused by the clogs. Right before Weary dies, he manages to convince another soldier; Paul Lazzaro that it was Billy’s fault that he was dying so Lazzaro vows to avenge the death of Weary by killing Billy.

In the teachings of the Tralfamadores, Billy concludes that after one dies, he only appears to be dead. We shouldn’t grieve and cry at their funeral since they were very much alive in their past. In their point of view, the moments they held with that person are still alive, it is simply an illusion of humans that once a moment has taken place, it is simply gone. In their world, they pick a moment from the past to live it endlessly, they will never loose their time with their loved ones. So when Billy goes at a funeral, he just thinks that the person is at a bad condition in that certain moment, and that their soul will live forever. When Billy sneaked out of house to go to New York, he stayed

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.

Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time. Although he does not know everything as the Tralfamadorian’s do and is not able to live each moment at the same time, he is able to move swiftly through time and his memories. Billy is the bridge between the Tralfamadorian beliefs and human beliefs in order to show that humans depend on memory. Billy shows that memory is productive. The Tralfamadorian’s depict a “So it goes” attitude towards death, because when a person dies they are never truly gone. They are still existing in other moments, which the Tralfamadorian’s are able to see at all times. Billy adopts the “So it goes” attitude when people die, but only because he is also able to revisit his memories with the deceased at any moment. However, humans are unable to adopt this attitude towards death. Once a person dies, they solely exist in one’s memories. But unlike the Tralfamadorian’s fourth dimension, and unlike Billy’s ability to time travel, human memory fades overtime and often becomes inaccessible. Yet, once a person has passed away, one can only interact with them through their memories. Humans are not able to adopt the “So it goes” attitude, because when someone dies it is permanent. Human’s heavily rely on memory, remembering is productive and serves a purpose.

Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel written by Kurt Vonnegut, tells the story of the devastating effects of war on a man, Billy Pilgrim, who joins the army fight in World War II. The semi-autobiographical novel sheds light on one of history’s most tragic, yet rarely spoken of events, the 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany.