Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, is a novel about Billy Pilgrim, a WWII veteran who claims that he has “ come unstuck in time. ” ( Slaughterhouse Five 23 ). Billy Pilgrim also seems to remember a trip to an alien planet; he spoke of it at a radio show and wrote of it to a newspaper. But most likely, his vivid recollections of extraterrestrial experiences and disposition to passive time travel are simply delusions stemming from a post-traumatic stress disorder. A post-traumatic stress disorder is a disorder caused by recent trauma, or the resurfacing of trauma in one’s child hood. Its symptoms include constant painful memories, reoccurring nightmares and sleep disturbances, among others.
In the prime of his life, his mental stability was tested with a series of potentially damaging events. As a child, his father threw him into the deep end of a pool, in an attempt to make him learn to swim – Billy nearly drowned and had to be rescued and revived. Later in his adolescence he showed signs of a mental disorder when he drastically intensified the risk of death in relatively safe environments, such as visits to a cavern or the Grand Canyon.
During the Second World War, Billy was a war prisoner and witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden – the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. While imprisoned, he attempted to sleep in close quarters with other soldiers, but many complaints arose about Billy’s whimpering and violent spasms during sleep, two examples of sleeping disturbances common to people with post-traumatic stress disorder. After having to dig through the rubble of Dreseden, in search of corpses, he was rescued, only to be honorably released due to his father’s death.
After a short break from traumatic occurrences, Billy had the honor of being the sole survivor of a plane crash; his brain was slightly damaged and while he was recuperating, his wife died, of carbon monoxide poisoning. While he was in the hospital, Billy read science-fiction novels, specifically about aliens and time travel. When he was released, he began working as an optometrist again, but experienced sleep deprivation, which, his doctor hypothesized, was the cause of his random weeping. And most recently, his daughter has been stripping him of his dignity, justifying her actions with claims that her father suffers from dementia and senility.
For many veterans, their participation in a war is enough to cause mental instability, and warrant treatment.
Within the novel Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Billy Pilgrim claims to have come “unstuck” in time. Having survived through being a Prisoner of War and the destruction of Dresden during World War II, and having been a prisoner used to clear away debris of the destruction, there can be little doubt that Pilgrim’s mental state was unstable. Furthermore, it may be concluded that Pilgrim, due to the effects of having been a Prisoner of War, and having been witness to the full magnitude of destruction, suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which caused him to review the events over and over during the course of his life. In order to understand how these factors, the destruction of Dresden and ‘PTSD’, came to make Billy Pilgrim “unstuck” in time, one must review over the circumstances surrounding those events.
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.
War novels often depict a war hero facing off against an enemy, with a winner on the other side. However, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five takes an opposite approach to the telling of a war story. The narrator uses the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, to display his own anti-war sentiment. Vonnegut’s style of writing as well as his characters help to portray the effect of war on individuals and society as a whole.
The book, Slaughter House-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, is based on the main character named Billy Pilgrim who is a little "lost" in the head. Billy is always traveling to different parts of his life and rarely in the present state. Throughout the book Billy mainly travels back and forth to three big times in his life. In each different time period of Billy's life he is in a different place; his present state is in a town called Illium and his "travels" are to Dresden and Tralfamadore. When Billy is in Illium he is suppose to have a "normal" life; he is married, has two children, and works as an optometrist. Then Billy travels back to Dresden where he was stationed in the last years of WWII and witnessed the horrible bombing. When Billy travels to Tralfamadore he is in an "imaginary" state, everything that happens to him is more like a dream. Through Billy's travels in time he shows that he is striving to find meaning in the events that happened in his life that he is afraid to acknowledge. As Billy says himself, "All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist," (1) this just proves even further that fact that Billy cannot ever forget any event in his life.
In the novel Vonnegut introduces a boy named Billy Pilgrim who is a young and inadequately trained soldier.Throughout the course of the novel, Billy jumps back and forth through his present and past life.The reader is under the impression that Billy is slightly eccentric as he begins to talk about a distant fourth dimension planet named Tralfamadore to which he is abducted to on occasion...
However, the books present response to war in a contrasting way. The incorporation of repetition, balance, and the idea of little control of one’s fate display parallelism between Billy Pilgrim and the soldiers of The Things They Carried while still distinguishing the existing psychological and internal contrast between them. When Billy is leading a parade in front of the Dresdeners prior to the bombing, Vonnegut
In reconciliation, my grandfather August Baier can be accredited the deed of planting the base of our family in which we grow and prosper today. As Russell M. Nielson once said, “When our hearts turn towards to our ancestors, something changes inside of us.” My grandfather August Baier, although in existence nearly 30 years ago, truly has an impact on me today. With every shadow, there is light. With every tear, there is a smile. Even though my grandfather is passed, with death I know there is still life, of which our family is today.
...nfortunate events, Mark Twain became very bitter, cynical and reclusive from the outside world. Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic style of writing and Mark Twain’s humorous and realism tone of writing have played a large role in the reasons of why literature is the way it is today.
Eliot, T.S. “Preludes” T.S. Eliot: Selected Poems. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1958. 22-4.
His legacy influenced a whole new genre of literacy. It influenced not just American but international literature. He was one of the first writers whom developed the genre of detective, fiction, and horror. He is known as the “Architect” of the modern short story. Poe was one of the first critics to focus on style in literary work. Steven King, Clive Barker, and others followed Poe’s footsteps. The genre of horror is bigger than ever today and Edgar Allan Poe was the forefront of this style of writing. French, Italians, and writers in Spanish and Portuguese acknowledge their debts to Poe. If not for Poe, we wouldn’t have all of the great horror and detective films and stories we still read to this day.
...han the feeling that the heart belongs to another creature [Madame de Montespan] when God would like to have it. How hard it must be to withdraw from this arrangement! Still, it must be done, Sire, or there is no hope of salvation.” (VII, 171) Bossuet tell Louis XIV this without stressing over losing his popularity with the king and therefore power and influence on other important people because Bossuet is a Bishop, so the king could not simply disregard him, as he could with nobles.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of Billy Pilgrim 's capture by the Nazi Germans during the last years of World War II. Throughout the narrative, excerpts of Billy’s life are portrayed from his pre-war self to his post-war insanity. Billy is able to move both forward and backwards through his life in a random cycle of events. Living the dull life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a provocative woman on the planet Tralfamadore, and simultaneously an American prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. While I agree with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt that Slaughterhouse-Five effectively combines fact and fiction, I argue that the book is more centralized around coping.
When Billy Pilgrim goes to war in Germany, he is soon captured by the Germans and taken to a prisoner camp. While there, he is mocked and ridiculed. He is a very passive character, and so is not bothered by this taunting, but when Billy realizes that the war doesn’t just affect soldiers and people, but all animals, such as the horses they find after the bombing of Dresden, his life is scarred forever. He sees that the horses are bleeding from their mouths and that they are in agony when walking. When Billy sees that his colleagues had mistreated the horses, he realizes that that is what war does to the entire world. Billy is forever changed and even weeps (197). This may have been the trigger for PTSD in Billy’s life to begin with.
Additionally, we learn that while he was recuperating, his wife died of carbon-monoxide poisoning trying to get to the hospital to see him. The entire story is basically told in Chapter 2.It is also in this chapter that Billy,"time-travels for the 1st time The series of scenes and fragmentations of Billy 's life in chapter 2 alone unnerving. Had we leaned the corse of events in a normal chronological sequence, rather than tidbit here and there, the events would have been m,ore understandable. We learn of his wife 's death in chapter 2, yet we learn the full circumstances of her death in chapter
I am Wiccan, which is a religion of present day witchcraft. My mother’s family is shaman; my father’s side of the family is Roman Catholic. Wicca has many divisions and subdivisions from Quaker Wicca to Hoodoo Wicca and from Shaman Wicca to Pagan Wicca. It’s as though Wicca absorbed, immersed, other religions and cultural traits. But, looking at Christianity, it seems like that religion absorbed other religions and cultural traits as well.