Escapism In Slaughterhouse-Five

Over the course of two decades, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, edited, rewrote, and revised the now classic ‘anti-war’ novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. While much of the fiction about WWll was romantic, and remained so well into the 50s’ and 60s’, Vonnegut refused to approach the war in this manner. Instead, Vonnegut decides to explore the life of Billy Pilgrim, and in doing so, criticizes the banality of the war through the banality of Billy’s ensuing trauma. Vonnegut primarily does this by switching between two locations, one of the hopelessly lost world that Billy actually inhabits, and that of the Tralfamadorians, that embodies the escapism that Billy relies on to get through the sludge of his daily life. Earth is dark in Slaughterhouse-five. Billy rarely finds joy in it, and even in events that are happy …show more content…
Its obvious deviation from the slog of Earth is refreshing to Billy. When Billy is first taken by the Tralfamadorians, he is surprisingly relaxed and calm to be taken. There’s never much anxiety surrounding his time with the Tralfamadorians--he’s calm when they undress him, when he’s in the zoo, and even when presented with the end of the universe. Billy’s reaction to the Tralfamadorians is highly unusual. Being presented with the idea that there is more intelligent life than humans, and that he is simply miserable because he cannot understand grander truths, doesn’t ever strike Billy as something to fear. Rather, for the first time in the novel, he lives in the moment and enjoys it. He’s cheered on my Tralfamadorians for beign tasks. Billy tries to read a novel and while unable to read it, is still excited by it. He loves Montana Wildhack. On the whole, Billy is serene, and the oddest and most existentially distressing questions that the Tralfamadorians raise never make Billy lose ground or his heart pound. Rather, they become extensions of questions about his life on the whole, and he just sits with