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Impacts of war on the live's human being
Emotional and psychological effects of war
Impacts of war on the live's human being
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After the war, Billy Pilgrim is suffering from PTSD and battling with depression and mental illness. Vonnegut spreads his anti-war message through the internal conflict that Billy goes through. Billy Pilgrim never fully recovers from the horrifying scenes he had seen at war and right after the war he fell into depression. Anything loud and abrupt startled Billy, “a siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting world war three at any time” (57). This indicates that the war will always have a negative impact on Billy and all the other soldiers. He lived in fear all the time and never felt safe around anyone or anything. The constant worry about being drafted to another war remains with him all the time. Also, Billy always felt Billy is so pessimistic about life that after each character's death Billy says, “so it goes” (20). This shows that death, to Billy, is hollow and inevitable. He is used to the emotional suffering so he is just casually dealing with it, which ties it back to the anti-war theme. The use of the satirical motif represents how war has taken something such as death, which is so drastic and made it so meaningless. In other words, he is just going through the motions without thinking too much because he is physically and mentally drained. Vonnegut shows that war does not only affect the soldier but also his family. After the war, Billy commits himself to the mental ward and he feels embarrassed when his mother visits him, “he always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward… she made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all” (102). This quote displays that Billy is battling mental illness and dealing with devastation. Parents work hard to raise their kids up and teach them to be grateful and to love
The human mind is a part of the body which current science knows little about. Trigger mechanisms, and other factors within the brain are relatively unknown to current humanity. Therefore, in order to produce a diagnostic on why Billy Pilgrim became “unstuck” in time, the reader of Slaughterhouse Five must come to terms with situations concerning the experiences described in the novel. Billy Pilgrim starts out, chronologically, as a fairly basic infantryman in the United States Army during the last Nazi offensive of the war, also known as the Battle of the Bulge (Vonnegut, 32). That battle resulted in fierce fighting, and also in massacres (such as the one that occurred near Malmedy, France), and the reader may be sure that there were men who became mentally unsound due to the effects of what they experienced there. Pilgrim is taken in by a group of soldiers who have found themselves behind the Nazi lines and are required to travel, by foot, back to friendly lines (Vonnegut, 32).
After a dramatic event happens in someone’s life such as war, some people cannot function the same way as they did previously. To make a reference to the novel, "Slaughterhouse five" written by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim’s character experiences war during World War II. Some drastic changes happened in his way of dealing with the fact of surviving a war. He claims to travel in time and to meet Aliens, called the "Tralfamadorian’s". This essay will discuss Billy believing that he is meeting Aliens and traveling in time, but in fact he only has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after surviving the war.
us about a character’s (Billy Pilgrim) life during World War two and how Billy coped with
... served in World War II and became a prisoner of war after the Battle of the Bulge. Kurt Vonnegut creates a fiction character named Billy Pilgrim in his novel to tell his story of what happened to him as a prisoner of war in Germany. This novel shows us how Billy Pilgrim acts after the war and how it has affected him tremendously. For example, years after the war when his plane crashes, the Austrians who save him say something in German and Billy thinks he is back in Dresden. This is a sign that Billy is suffering from PTSD because remembering the events like it is happening in the present is one of the symptoms. Also Vonnegut is showing signs of PTSD because he had to create the fictional character of Billy Pilgrim to tell his story. This novel clearly shows that Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim are still suffering from PTSD many years after their traumatic experiences.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five the main character Billy Pilgrim experiences few emotions during his time in World War II. His responses to people and events lack intensity or passion. Throughout the novel Billy describes his time travel to different moments in his life, including his experience with the creatures of Tralfamadore and the bombing of Dresden. He wishes to die during most of the novel and is unable to connect with almost anyone on Earth. The fictional planet Tralfamadore appears to be Billy’s only way of escaping the horrors of war, and acts as coping mechanism. Billy seems to be a soldier with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as he struggles to express feelings and live in his reality. At the beginning of the novel the narrator proposes his reason for writing the book is to explain what happened in the Dresden fire bombing, yet he focuses on Billy’s psyche more than the bombing itself. PTSD prevents Billy from living a healthy life, which shows readers that the war does not stop after the fighting is over and the aftermath is ongoing. Billy Pilgrim’s story portrays the bombing and war in a negative light to readers, as Vonnegut shows the damaging effects of war on an individual, such as misperception of time, disconnect from peers, and inability to feel strong emotions, to overall create a stronger message.
When Vonnegut created Billy Pilgrim, he made Billy subject to the experience of the war. In fact, Billy experiences it almost. exactly the same as Vonnegut himself had, including the experiences of being a POW and in the firebombing of Dresden. The. But in Billy's case, Vonnegut writes it with.
He has seen so much death all through the war and the bombing of Dresden. In Slaughterhouse Five whenever any living thing dies because of the war, medical reasons or accident the first comment by Billy is “So it goes”. “The real Iron Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a sort of boiler which was shaped like a women on the outside-and lined with spikes. The front of the women was composed of two hinged doors. The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly. There were two special spikes where his eyes would be. There was a drain at the bottom to let out all the blood. So it goes” (36). One of the most gruesome deaths described in the book has no emotional effect on Billy. The war wipes out the sentimental mindset of death from the minds of Billy and others who experience the destructiveness in
When Billy Pilgrim went to war “He didn’t look like a soldier at all, he looked like a filthy flamingo.” Not ready to go out the door like a child, Billy is unprepared to go to war. No helmet, no protective armor, weapon or proper footwear he is as ready as a child who has not woken yet. Billy is clearly a child in many ways: he is naïve, gullible, ignorant, and lacks historical judgment and experience.
In Vonnegut’s science fiction and dystopian novel Cat’s Cradle, the main character, John, demonstrates his personal growth and from that, his enlightened attitude towards the unnecessary horrors that war creates. In the beginning of the novel, John sets out to discover and gather information on what people’s lives were like the day that the atomic bomb dropped. Along his path of discovery, he meets the Hoenikker family, of which Felix was the patriarch and the creator of the elusive, dangerous material ice-nine. John then gets sidetracked of his initial quest and becomes infatuated on his pursuit for more knowledge about ice-nine. From there, he stumbles across more of the Hoenikker children as well as the Bokonon people and their peculiar faith. Once John is on the island he learns of the disastrous potential that ice-nine has, and by the end of the novel, witnesses it’s power as it kills virtually the entire human race. At the very end of the novel, John recognizes what his quest for ultimate truth led him to (destruction of humanity) and furthermore sees the cruel, blind and horrible nature of war (ice-nine/weapons of mass destruction). Vonnegut’s next book, Slaughterhouse-Five, another science-fiction novel that was written just a few years after details the life of Billy Pilgrim, a goofy, awkward, and incompetent guy whose life never seems to turn out the way he anticipates. When Billy was a young man, against his wish, he was drafted to fight against the Germans in World War II. As most men do in war, Billy experiences horrific sights on and off the battlefield. As a result he greatly traumatized for the rest of his life because of it. Then, in h...
During the book, the author use words or phrases as a form of mock seriousness that gives way to the absurd. Especially after a person died, there will have “So it goes” (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969). The author wants to use this kind of specific words to emphasize that the war is really oppressive and cruel. The author through the Billy’s perspective to explain his own feelings, and condemn the Fascism’s brutal, and laugh at human start the war stupid because the war causes a lot of unfair, make many people died, and anyone involved the war have bad life. The only thing that the war can give us is unhappiness, and cannot bring anything good. Conversely, the peaceful environment not only can make people fell security, but also promote the social
In the novel, Kurt Vonnegut proposes the question of whether free will exist or not. The Tralfamadorians live with the idea of the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension contains occurring and reoccurring events, considering that they believe all moments have already passed. According to the Tralfamadorians, there is only free will on Earth, considering humans only think of time as a linear progression. Billy regresses back to events as a child, and remembers when his father let him sink to the bottom of the pool where he prefers to be, but he was rescued. As a young adult, Billy was drafted into the war against his free will. Even as a soldier in the war, Billy is not taken solemnly by the other soldiers. Billy comes to the conclusion that even if he trained hard, and became a good soldier he’d still die like the other soldiers in Dresden who are much better than him. Billy’s real world on earth seems to be taken into bits and pieces into the Tralfamadorian world where Billy thinks is error free. Although the serenity prayer is directed towards God, Billy directs it towards the Tralfamadorians instead. This prayer is significant to this theme, because Billy is trying to live up to the standards of the Tralfamadorians, which is nearly impossible and
After serving in World War Two, Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five about his experiences through Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five is a dark novel about war and death. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental disease that inflicts people who endured a traumatic event. Some of the common symptoms include flashbacks and creating alternate worlds which Billy Pilgrim experienced various times throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim believes he has become “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 29) and travels to different moments throughout his life. Pilgrim is never in one event for long and his flashbacks are triggered by almost everything he does. While his “time-traveling” is sporadic and never to a relevant time, all of Billy Pilgrims flashbacks are connected through actions done in each of the visions. Perhaps the most important flashback occurred at ...
Instead of living his life in chronological order, Billy relives random events of his life an endless number of times. However, each time an event is relived, the same outcome of the event occurs. Billy experiences the deaths of numerous friends, enemies, and neutral characters of his life. Each time a character dies, the saying "So it goes" follows. "So it goes" is a significant quote in the story, that reflects Billy's perception of death. Instead of treating death as a shocking and avoidable death, Billy recognizes through the teaching of Tralfamadorians that death itself is only a mere moment in a person's life, and instead of reflecting upon death itself, Billy should rather embrace the positive aspects of a person's life. For example, Billy dies at the hands of an assassin at a very old age, sent by Lazzaro,a misinformed thief who believes Billy was the cause of his friend's death during World War II at a young age. As Billy relives events through his life, including the Firebombing of Dresden, Billy does not fear for his life, knowing his death will only be as a result of Lazzaro. Furthermore, Billy is repeatedly abducted by the Tralfamadorians the evening after his daughter's wedding. Instead of seeking escape from the Tralfamadorians, Billy openly accepts his abduction. Billy recognizes that whatever events in his life that
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, uses the biblical allusion of Lot’s wife looking back on the destroyed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to parallel the story of Billy Pilgrim during the war and his experience after, when he returns to the United States. Although the reference is brief, it has profound implications to the portrayal of America during World War II, especially the bombing of Dresden. Although Lot’s wife’s action dooms her to turn into a pillar of salt, the narrator emphasizes her choice to indicate the importance of being compassionate and having hindsight. Ultimately, Slaughterhouse-Five critiques the American social attitude to disregard the unjust nature of its actions in World War II. Furthermore, Vonnegut’s novel explicates this by elucidating the horrors of war—especially in regard to the massacre of innocence, how it leaves the soldiers stagnant when they return home, and leaves them empty with an American Dream that cannot be fulfilled. In order to combat violence, the novel stresses that one must hold human life to a higher value and be compassionate towards others; America must acknowledge its mistakes so that the soldiers who fought and died for her so that the soldiers may move on.
Billy Pilgrim is also not like Pilgrim who is the main character in the “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, although they have same last name. His experience is very horrible in the war, there are just have violence and cruel, like the soldier who is in the “Three musketeers”. Imaginary, a man who just naive and have a great lucky, how can he keep his life in the war, just lucky? It is funny. Thus, though the whole novel “Slaughter-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character, Billy Pilgrim is a contradictory person who has the naive and sane attitude together, in almost time he looks like a child, but his wise can “see” at his speaking and action, likes his speaking “So it goes.” (2) Not only is the indifference to the lives, or the hatred and