Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Essay

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.

Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” is a sardonic novel chronicling the experiences of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran, survivor of the Dresden firebombing, and protagonist of the novel. Billy is a very unreliable narrator who has become “unstuck in time”. Billy is constantly journeying through time; at one moment he’s a flourishing optometrist and the next he’s a prisoner of war in Germany. Billy is forced to deal with an existential crisis presented forth by the great destruction he witnesses. These horrible atrocities that Billy encounters (bombing of Dresden, execution of Edgar Derby, etc.); however, are all really means to an end. They expose Billy to a contrast, that is, a way in which he can assess his own life and search for meaning. Life and being are seldom questioned. Billy is unique. He watches as thousands of lives are extinguished and he can only wonder “why?” The fact of the matter is, there is no answer. There is no reason why. Billy cannot understand this, which, ultimately, leads to his acceptance of the Tralfamadorian view that nothing has any meaning at all.

Billy is displayed as being a weak and unprepared soldier. He is a mockery to everyone around him but still manages to survive WWII. This irony is exemplified through what Billy wears as a prisoner of war. Vonnegut writes, “And then they saw bearded Billy Pilgrim in his blue toga and silver shoes, with his hands in a muff. He looked at least sixty years old,” (Vonnegut 149). By making Billy an antihero, Vonnegut highlights the antiwar sentiment of the entire work. Billy’s weakness shows the flaws in people’s glorified depictions of war and of an American soldier. The traumatized Billy after the war also contrasts a traditional hero and shows another way that war can be destructive. Vonnegut’s development of Billy as an antihero supports the themes of Slaughterhouse

Specific parts of the book add to the anti-warism that it contains. One of these parts is when Vonnegut writes, "Above all, he wanted to be avenged, so he said again and again the name of the person who had killed him" (79). This part of the novel is telling about the death of Roland Weary. He told everyone that Billy was responsible for his death. The soldiers should have been fighting the opposition in the war instead of their own countrymen.

Through Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut protests his own feelings about war. Towards the beginning of the novel, Vonnegut visits his old wartime buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare and meets his wife, Mary. She is strangely already mad at Vonnegut because she assumed that he would write a war novel that will glorify the way men fight in wars when they actually send terrified babies off to war, not men. Mary also believed that war movies and books encouraged the chances of war. However, she was not directly angry at Vonnegut; she was angered by the thought of war and how babies are killing other babies on the battlefield.

Vonnegut shows the level of coping skills with Billy Pilgrim as he first became a soldier. The audience soon learns that billy did not fulfill the soldier stereotype and wasn't bad to the bone or balls to the wall. He was timid six foot man afraid of many things. That later caused him to have detrimental state of mind. The first glimpse of this is when Billy goes to optometry school where the audience learns he was drafted into the war to join the war. A eighteen year old roland weary constantly saving billy’s life. “ Billy wouldn't do anything to save himself, Billy wanted to quit, he was cold, hungry,embarrassed

With this description, Vonnegut vastly distances Billy from the ideal, strong and mighty image of a soldier, yet Billy is a soldier nonetheless. Not only is this weak and ungracious character fighting and representing the honour of his country but also he is one of the few soldiers who survive the war; he outlives many of the other soldiers that could be considered better suited for war. Furthermore, Vonnegut compares Billy to a filthy flamingo, highlighting the distance that exists between society's soldier ideal, graceful and admirable, and the soldiers' reality, harsh and rampageous. In short, Billy is so far from what is expected that he “shouldn't even be in the Army” (51). However, Billy is not the only soldier in this ludicrous predicament. Vonnegut describes the entire Army as chaotic, confused and ludicrous:

People allow adversity to rid them of hope. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut highlights the pitfalls of mankind in their perception of love, death, war, and societal norms through the unusually clear lenses of Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim’s acceptance towards life relieves him of the weight of the world; however, even Pilgrim is unable to remain indifferent about war. Billy Pilgrim encounter with the Tralfamadorians granted him an extraterrestrial way of thinking.

A significant theme in Slaughterhouse-Five is the cruelty of war and the effects that it has on people. Throughout the book, Billy has episodes in which he travels back and forth in his life. There are many moments when Billy travels back in time that take place when he was a soldier during World War II. During these flashbacks, Billy describes how horrible life was during the war; being held as a prisoner and watching civilians and friends die,“The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else […] They were all being killed with their families.

Kurt Vonnegut seems to portray the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim, much like himself, a war participant and truth seeker. In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut characterizes Billy Pilgrim as a war survivor with PTSD(Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). In doing so, Vonnegut uses tone to reveal the extremely violent and unruly nature of war and flashbacks to show how war causes Pilgrim to lose touch with reality.

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,

“But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it,” 1 Timothy 6:6-7. The Bible uses contentment to promote trust in God above all else, and not stress about the things that cannot be changed. Throughout the course of the anti-war book, Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut skillfully uses biblical references in the text to promote a similar way of thinking. Continually life is presented as no more than something controlled by fate, for freewill is an imaginary idea that people come up with to give them a sense of peace.

The thing that stands out the most from Vonnegut’s masterpiece is the way he structures it, and it subsequently unnerved me as a reader. It is not like any other novel, in that “Billy begins to experience past, present, and future events at random, without reference” (Werlock). This nonlinearized structure is also emulated in the structure of the novel, making it something both the reader and Pilgrim experience his entire life out of order. Interestingly, Vonnegut addresses this structure in the novel, by including “Tralfamadorian Novels” which are multiple scenes meant to be read together to invoke strong feelings in the reader. Billy’s life being unfolded means that the reader observes it all at once, and implies that they are meant to gain some major insight or feeling from it (Gallagher). This hint, given about halfway through the novel, forces the reader to consider the meaning of the structure, and try to decide which emotion is meant to be drawn from Billy’s life. Initially, I only found apathy. As already addressed with Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, apathy tends to be the most accepted view. The author seems passive, as if to say that people should just settle and let to world beat them down into a bloodied pulp. The view can be easily derived from Billy’s behavior throughout the entire

Many people returned from World War II with disturbing images forever stuck in their heads. Others returned and went crazy due to the many hardships and terrors faced. The protagonist in Slaughter-House Five, Billy Pilgrim, has to deal with some of these things along with many other complications in his life. Slaughter House Five (1968), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is an anti-war novel about a man’s life before, after and during the time he spent fighting in World War II. While Billy is trying to escape from behind enemy lines, he is captured and imprisoned in a German slaughterhouse. The author tells of Billy’s terrible experiences there. After the war, Billy marries and goes to school to

Ask a child how they would describe a soldier, they would describe them as brave, strong, and just, but unknown to these children. These valiant heroes of justice are at a ripe old age of eighteen. The media portrays soldiers in a way to make them seem like they are stoic and strong fighters that are the servants of Mother Liberty. In Vonnegut’s book, Slaughterhouse-Five, he conveys a message through the experiences of Billy Pilgrim and his pilgrimage around time and space, with the masterful use of diction and irony.Vonnegut’s message is that war is a horrific place not properly described by the media and not meant for the wrongly portrayed soldiers.