Billy Pilgrim

In Susanne Vees-Gulani's article "Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five", Vees-Gulani reads Pilgrim, the main protagonist, through the lens of PTSD. She states, "Just as mainstream American society does not provide an atmosphere conducive to recovery from the horrors of war, the psychiatric establishment also fails Billy.” Though it may not be obvious, veterans’ struggles with PTSD is one of the vital themes…

Hiroshima as well. In the hospital Billy and another character read in the newspaper, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base” (Vonnegut 185). This event in history happened shortly after the bombing of Dresden. The second historical context of this book is the time period in which it was written - the Vietnam War. This is especially evident when, later on in Billy’s life, his son becomes a veteran himself; “Billy had a son who was a…

Joe Haldeman once said, “No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation” (“Joe Haldeman Quotes.”). This means that the trauma of war is as inescapable as Einstein’s laws of relativity. The authors of these books explore the inevitability of war’s trauma throughout their works. In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, the authors use the rhetorical devices of imagery, similes,…

reviewed thought processes. Life itself is not genuine and everything is taken calmly. For example, Montana Wildhack, Billy’s accomplice on Tralfamadore is appeared as a model who stars in a film appeared in a film shown in a pornographic book shop when Billy makes a trip to look at the Kilgore Trout books. She is kidnapped and set in Billy’s natural surroundings on Tralfamadore, where they engage in sexual relations and deliver a child. Billy’s visit to Tralfamadore has realized an adjustment…

little jelly belly made potching sounds. Billy gurgled and cooed. (84-85) Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five not only portraits Billy’s life in on non-linear mode he even portrays the world history in non-linear mode, his story jumps back and forth in history from War in Vietnam, World War II, Crusade until the beginning of the human kind to Adam and Eve. Vonnegut shows us how Billy’s life will end but he also shows us how the universe will end. Through Billy and his Dresden story Vonnegut…

the life of Billy Pilgrim. Depicted in the “Slaughterhouse-five” by Kurt Vonnegut as well as that of civilians. The murder of civilians is not admissible in any war. Acts of war are cataclysms caused by the distressed egotism of government officials. The absurdity of war is one that that is inadmissible and what war does to humanity transcends our imagination. The novel by Kurt Vonnegut has the predominant themes of how war affects life. He tells the story of an anti-hero Billy Pilgrim. Billy’s…

while German regular folks reviled and tossed rocks at them (9). Vonnegut additionally includes “There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers, All these civilians’ remains were burnt to ashes” (10). Billy considers, that a lot of accentuation upon “time” and “action” has prompted to…

Billy’s method to escape the turmoils of Earth. Along with entrancing himself with Tralfamadorian beliefs, Billy starts to see a primary philosophy practiced by these aliens: fatalism. This is an outlook on life that consists of one believing that life is meaningless, and that in the end, everyone dies. The book as a whole, however, ridicules this fatalism philosophy. Tralfamadore does give Billy a sense of happiness throughout the rest of his life (Marvin, 130). Vonnegut’s usage of satire and…

Billy is being lazy and not confronting his problem, instead he is becoming numb to the world. McKean believes that, “They teach him to “ignore the awful times,” to “concentrate on the good ones.” They urge him to “stare only at pretty things.” (McKean 71). This shows that the aliens in Billy’s fantasy urged him to forget about his problems and only focus on good things. However, life doesn’t work that way and eventually Billy will have to deal with his PTSD sooner…

In this passage of his novel Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut describes the Tralfamadorian approach to writing a book and cleverly expresses his disapproval towards their mindset that accepts everything as unchangeable and avoids the problem. Tralfamadorians have the ability to view all periods time simultaneously, so they see all of time as already predetermined. Consequently, they write their books with episodic storytelling to make one holistic image of life as beautiful and deep. Since…