Slaughterhouse Five
Billy Pilgrim is born in 1922 and grows up in Ilium, New York. A funny-looking, weak youth, he does well in high school, then he enrolls in night classes at the Ilium School of Optometry, and is soon drafted into the army. He serves as a chaplain's assistant, is sent into the Battle of the Bulge, and almost gets taken prisoner by the Germans. Just before being captured he first becomes unstuck in time. He sees the entirety of his life in one sweep. Billy is transported with other privates to the beautiful city of Dresden. There the prisoners are made to work for their keep. They are kept in a former slaughterhouse. Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight meat locker. They emerge to find a moonscape of destruction. Several days’ later Russian forces capture the city and the war is over. Billy returns to Ilium and finishes optometry school. He gets engaged to the daughter of the founder of the school. His wealthy father-in-law sets him up in the optometry business. Billy and his wife raise two children and become wealthy.
One day in 1967, as he claims on a radio talk show and in a letter to the editor, Billy is kidnapped by two-foot high aliens whose body shape is reminiscent of an upside down toilet plunger. These are the Tralfamadorians. They take him to Tralfamadore where they mate him with the actress Montana Wildhack and keep both earthlings in a zoo. They also explain to him their perception of time, how all of it exists for them simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When someone dies he is simply dead at a particular time. Somewhere else and at a different time he is alive and well. Tralfamadorians prefer to look at the nice moments.
When he is returned to earth, Billy initially says nothing. However, after he suffers a head injury in a plane crash and after his wife dies on her way to see him in the hospital, Billy tells the world what he has learned. He goes on a radio talk show and writes a letter to the newspaper. His daughter is at her wit's end and doesn't know what to do with him. Billy makes a tape recording of his account of his death, which will occur in 1976 after Chicago has been hydrogen bombed by the Chinese. He knows exactly how it will happen: a man he knew in the war will hire someone to shoot him. Billy will experience the violet hum of death, then will skip back to some other point in his life. He's see...
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...ughterhouse-Five, it seems that both the narrator and Billy Pilgrim are represented as author. The point of view in this book is the author is looking at the events of his own life; past, present, and future and trying to make some sense out of them the same way that Billy is trying to order the events of his own life.
The author uses short, simple sentences that manage to say a lot in a few words. The author also uses imagery. He also puts in his book references to historical events. These references increase the understanding and appreciation of Billy's story by suggesting historical and literary parallels to the personal events in his life. The novel does not have smooth transitions from one event to the next.
A normal novel has smooth transition. Vonnegut wrote this book without any smooth transition. This novel is very complicated. The topics that are mention are hard to understand. The book was a bit difficult to follow. Slaughter House-Five's character's needs more depth. More description is necessary. There was too much jumping around in time in Billy’s life. I thought that this book was going to be better than it actually was.
I wouldn’t recommend this book to a person wh
Billy Pilgrim time travels to various moments in his life at random, which suggests he has no power over his mind and the memories that haunt him. He “is spastic in time, (and) has no control over where he is going next” (Vonnegut 43), as he struggles to make sense of his past. Billy’s ability to remember events in an erratic sequence, mirrors the happenings of war. War is sudden, fast paced, and filled with unexpected twists and turns. Billy cannot forget what he experienced during his time as a soldier, and in turn his mind subconsciously imitates this hectic quality of war. This behavior proves that although the war is over, “psychologically, Billy has never fully left” (Vees-Gulani). For many soldiers, especially those who were prisoners of war (POW), it is inevitable that their mind will not be like it once was (Vees-Gulani).
Throughout the book, the author creates numerous hardships that Billy has to live through. One of the hardships that he is given is that he is captured in German lines of the war that he was drafted into, and was shipped with other American prisoners of war to a camp that was filled with dying Russians. After that, they were moved to Dresden where no one would expect this city to be bombed, but sooner than imagined, nothing was left of the breathtakingly beautiful German city. Another hardship that Billy faced and contributed to his moral struggle and issues in the story is after he returns back home from Dresden´s crazy firestorm, he gets engaged with Valencia and soon following is a nervous breakdown and recovers of it amazingly to have two children become more in depth of optometry to make more money to support his new family. To continue his life while it is on a high, Billy and his wife travel by airplane to an optometry conference in Montreal, resulting in a skull fracture for Billy and Valencia passes due to carbon monoxide poisoning on her way to see her husband at the hospital. Billy struggled through tough times and situations but kept going, even after he went mentally insane, even with the moral struggles and issues that were thrown out at him throughout his life
The story begins with Billy Pilgrim becoming "unstuck in time." Throughout the novel, Billy time travels to different times in his life. He's never sure where he'll go next, but he always returns to WWII, which is the main plot line. After Billy's life summary, which actually summarizes many of the events of the novel, the story jumps to when Billy first became "unstuck in time": 1944. Billy is a chaplain's assistant in the army during WWII, and is called oversees after the death of a chaplain's assistant in Europe. He is sent to his regiment during their involvement in the Battle of the Bulge; they do not win. Not being much of a military man, Billy Pilgrim wanders behind German lines until he meets three other American soldiers. After many near deaths, Billy is captured by the Germans and taken to a prisoner camp. While on his way to the camp Billy travels to 1967, the year he is abducted by a flying saucer from Tralfam...
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the favorite dark humorists of the past century. Combining humor and poignancy, he has become one of the most respected authors of his generation. For twenty years, Kurt Vonnegut worked on writing his most famous novel ever: Slaughter House Five. The novelist was called "A laughing prophet of doom" by the New York Times, and his novel "a cause for celebration" by the Chicago Sun-Times. However, Vonnegut himself thought it was a failure. He said that, just as Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back, so his book is nothing but a pillar of salt. Kurt Vonnegut tied in personal beliefs, characters, and settings from his life into the novel Slaughter House Five.
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 Kurt Vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse Five, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, the remains of a man who has become a traumatized war struck soldier. In creating and developing Billy Pilgrim, the war, along with family influence, shapes how Billy acts in his two different lives: life in the military and life alone. Billy Pilgrim is surely on a mission, because his excessive time travelling doesn’t seem to happen for no reason. Billy circulates around his life, even through the moments of capital importance when he seems hopeless. He’s a mind boggling and confused man who tries to play the game of life the way society expects him to, but sometimes has the feeling that he was meant for greater things.
Vonnegut's writing style throughout the novel is very flip, light, and sarcastic. The narrator's observations and the events occurring during the novel reflect a dark view of humanity which can only be mocked by humor. At the beginning of the novel the narrator is researching for a book he is writing. The book was to be about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the lives of the people who created the bomb. The narrator travels through the plot of the story, with characters flying in and out, in almost a daze. He is involved in events which are helplessly beyond his control, but which are inevitably leading to a destination at the end.
When he is in a green wagon that is filled with loot being pulled by two horses. The condition of the horse makes Billy cry. The horses are dying slowly of thirst and their hooves are battered and cracked. This is the only time Billy cries throughout the entire book. He doesn’t see this event in through his “Tralfamadorian eyes.” He feels sad, wishing he could do something about it, but he cannot, because it was meant to be that way, it always has, and always will. Billy, throughout time, has the mentality to try and educate the public about the ways of Tralfamadore. He writes to the newspapers to tell people that they are viewing the world all long, and how it is in four dimensions instead of three. “If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by
...madorian concept of time and has finally achieved the peace he has so long needed. “It was all right, said Billy. Everything is all right and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfalmadore”(198). As he was giving his speech in Chicago, Billy knew he would die that day by the end of his speech. This showed how much he had accepted what the Tralfalmadorian’s had taught to him. “It is time for your to go home to your wives and children, and it is time for me to be dead for a little while-and then live again.”(142). Billy’s belief in the Tralfalmadorian concept of time not only gives him peace of mind, but a courage that he will not fear death because he will still live in memories therefore not being dead at all.
Billy learned his philosophy of death from the Tralfamadorians, the aliens who abducted him. They believed that time was virtually nonexistent, so when you die, they were only deceased at that moment and alive all the others. Billy has traveled in time all throughout his life, so he has seen a lot of death; The deaths of many American and Russian soldiers in the train and slaughterhouse, the death of his wife; dozens of others in a plane crash, and his own death. Everything that Billy saw was death, so he quickly became used to it to the point where it didn’t matter much to him. He awaited his death; at his speech he would say “hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye.” to tell his audience and “adoring fans” that he would never truly leave, that when he would be shot on the scene they should just let it occur, because they would always remember him, he would never truly leave. Whenever Billy saw death or spoke of it, he would just say “so it goes.” Billy used this phrase to help cope with the loss of someone and move on, unlike Tim who spent countless hours dreaming and crying over someone’s death. Billy also knew when a death would occur so it never came as a shock to him. Overall Billy became numb to all the death he saw each and everyday that he had no other choice but to accept it, and he was happier that
Billy and Layla finally arrive to his house, in front of the house there’s a huge sign: “Go Buffalo” this is a clue on the environment Billie lived in at home. It is obvious his parents are huge football fans by the decoration of the house. Layla get in the character of being Billy’s wife, she makes up a story that Billy works for the CIA and that she really adores him. The next scene shows us three of the characters sitting around a table, and every minute it keeps switching. It seems like the camera is going through a point of view of one of the characters, and it keeps changing each time someone else speaks.
Billy is, in fact, more than 30 years old but he looks like a young adult whose social interaction skills are not acquired perfectly. He is known to have a mother whose influence is greater on him than anyone else. He gets so worried every time her name is mentioned. He stutters, especially when he is under pressure by others, and he is an internalizer, meaning that he does not express his emotions as much as he is supposed to be. Instead, he often prefers to escape from his problems or conditions rather than facing them. As a result of this type of internalization, he has suicidal patterns. For instance, when his mother gets angry at him about his marriage proposal to a young lady, he tries to cut his wrests and kill himself. Though, he fails at this attempt, he succeeds in another one towards the end of the
Throughout, SlaughterHouse-Five, Billy, is randomly time traveling. Whenever, Billy want to not deal with reality, he has an out-of-body experience. In his time-traveling, Billy knows the outcome of many events. He can change the outcome, yet he chooses not to.
Though he was able to escape war unharmed, Billy seems to be mentally unstable. In fact, his nightmares in the German boxcar at the prisoners of war (POW) camp indicate that he is experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): “And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car. Nearly everybody, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away” (79). Billy’s PTSD is also previously hinted when he panics at the sound of sirens: “A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War III at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon” (57). The most prominent symptom of PTSD, however, is reliving disturbing past experiences which is done to an even more extreme extent with Billy as Slaughterhouse-Five’s chronology itself correlates with this symptom. Billy’s “abduction” and conformity to Tralfamadorian beliefs seem to be his method of managing his insecurity and PTSD. He uses the Tralfamadorian motto “so it goes” as a coping mechanism each time he relives a tragic event. As Billy struggles with the conflict of PTSD, the work’s chronological order is altered, he starts to believe
“Slaughterhouse-Five” is an anti-war novel. It describes a flesh-and-blood world. Main character is Billy Pilgrim, he is a time traveler in this book, his first name Billy is from the greatest novelist in the USA in 19 century’s novel “Billy Budd” ; and his last name is from “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan. Differently, the main character in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” ’s traveling has meaning and discovering, Billy Pilgrim’s traveling just has violence and escape. In the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut ’s main character, Billy Pilgrim is sane and his time travel is half in his mind half is real. He is looked so innocent and weakness, there is a sentence which is spoken by Billy Pilgrim “So it goes.” (2) This quotation shows that a poignant sense of helplessness.