Billy Pilgrim

by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim has been through a life that no other human can imagine. With several themes built into this novel, Billy shows his growth within himself as a character. As Billy flashes back and forth from being in the army in Dresden, being captured on the planet of Tralfamadore, and his relationship with his fiancé, Billy gives an idea about his post-traumatic disorder. While working in Dresden, Billy begins his journey at a not so very serious approach. Billy takes the…

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five comments largely on the destructive nature of war. Our childlike protagonist Billy Pilgrim was essentially robbed of his innocence due to his drafting into the military. My first thoughts on this novel were about how Billy’s story extends to other soldiers and victims of war. The breaking of men and women’s’ ability to cope with the world extends far past the case of Billy. This is not just an isolated incident, it occurs much more often than most people care to…

The next one I write is going to be fun. ….. It began like this: Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet.” Vonnegut was a writer and author of many books and was in World War II as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. I think that Vonnegut wrote this book as way to tell people about Dresden…

Kurt Vonnegut’s historical-fiction novel, Slaughterhouse Five, analyzes the life of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran who survived the horrific firebombing of Dresden, Germany in the year 1945. Billy Pilgrim narrates the timeline of his life, with events being told out of order and with, what seem to be, bizarre twists added to it. Slaughterhouse Five is a novel that can be interpreted in different ways, which is why it created enough controversy to be banned in schools all over the United…

When Billy visited his old war buddy Mary’s husband to discuss the war for a book he was going to write. He had two little girls with him (15). Her admiration was shown in the way she treated the girls. The girls were mixed right in with her own to play games and watch television (16). Mary had a problem with Billy discussing the war, she felt the ones who fought the war was only babies including them (18). She wanted the book Billy was going to write to tell the truth…

free will and Billy Pilgrim’s destiny is predetermined. Both novels present a great degree of determinism, yet how it is approached differs in each character’s experiences. In Heart of Darkness, when Marlow enters the Company’s office, he encounters two women knitting black wool. This…

the passage from Slaughterhouse Five analyzed in this essay, the main character Billy Pilgrim, a time traveler and World War II soldier, travels a few hours further in time to watch a World War II movie backwards. This passage was chosen due to the way Vonnegut uses a backwards movie to exemplify the…

Slaughterhouse-Five’s phrase repetition analysis Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi autobiography of the journey of Billy Pilgrim through WWII merged together with time travel and aliens. He sees his own birth and death and everything in between. According to Vonnegut, this book is “short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligence to say about a massacre” (19). The author uses the repetition of phrases and events, such as “so it goes”, the character wild bob, and…

reality. Billy Pilgrim copes with American life and war through disruption of reality in the long term. Billy has the curious ability to mentally distance himself from the present using very vivid memories either from his past or delusions from an alien planet where he was kept in a zoo, naked with a Hollywood starlet, and he discovered a fourth dimension where time is not linear and can see the future but no death. Billy’s tralfamadore is a reaction to the trauma of war, that resurfaced when…

introduces Billy Pilgrim as someone who was affected by the bombing of Dresden, and someone who is taken by Tralfamadorians (an alien species) to talk to him about their theories of time. There are many ways to react to a catastrophe, but the author emphasizes the significance of confronting it, and Billy Pilgrim does just that. This American classic anti-war novel is relevant to today because it puts a focus on the different reactions there are to tragic events that both Billy Pilgrim and real…