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Can troublesome war experiences really play a role in causing hallucinations? A hallucination is a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside of one’s mind. An individual who suffers from hallucinations is Billy Pilgrim. Billy, a person who can supposedly time travel, jumps between his time on the alien planet Tralfamadore, his experiences during World War II, and his captivity in a German prison camp. His hallucinations may have been caused by the airplane crash that damaged his brain. He believes that there is a planet named Tralfamadore, far from Earth, and that he has been kidnapped and taken there to be studied. Throughout the novel, Billy believes that what he sees is real while many others, like his daughter Barbara, get the impression that it is just Billy’s imagination. In the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the parallels between Billy’s Tralfamadore and his horrid experiences of war, as well as Tralfamadore's similarities to Kilgore Trout’s science fiction books show that Tralfamadore is just a figment of Billy’s imagination.
Billy's obsession with Kilgore Trout's novels, which depict worlds and ideas similar to those of Tralfamadore, casts doubt on the reality of Tralfamadore. Billy's hallucinations are likely shaped by his fixation on these novels, which is clear in the many aspects of Tralfamadore that are similar to parts of Trout's books. One similarity is in “The Big Board...It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212” (201). This shows the biggest clue that Tralfamadore is a figment of Billy’s imagination because his captivity on Tralfamadore is extremely reminiscent of the protagon...
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...ences but also to his other times in the real world.
Hallucinations are usually caused by extreme stress. It comes to the big idea that people let their imagination run wild when they experience horrific events. They are a way of coping with dreadful occasions, such as war, as they allow someone to escape from reality for a time. These delusions often mirror in some way experiences in a person's life, perhaps because the person is attempting to deal with these events psychologically. Billy's terrible experiences with the bombing of Dresden, and throughout the war, force him to seek refuge in hallucinations. His experiences on Tralfamadore are very similar to Trout's books and to his wartime experiences, and this similarity shows that Tralfamadore is a figment of Billy's imagination.
Works Cited
Vonnegut, Kurt. SlaughterHouse – Five. New York: MCA Music, 1969.
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).
has to face is post-traumatic stress disorder. Post-traumatic stress disorder is “an anxiety disorder that can occur after someone experiences a traumatic event that caused intense fear, helplessness, or horror. PTSD can result from personally experienced traumas (e.g., rape, war, natural disasters, abuse, serious accidents, and captivity) or from the witnessing or learning of a violent or tragic event.” Otherwise meaning something happened in your past keeps triggering and haunting you in present day and experiences that could put you into a mental shock. Even though Billy Pilgrim is no longer involved with the war, he still is involved with the war. (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Billy Pilgrim had to face many different types of traumatic events. In the Slaughterhouse-Five the book mention Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension by Kilgore Trout stated “It was about people whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them (Slaughterhouse-Five 104).” Saying that the Earth doctors wouldn’t know what they were dealing with. If someone would tell they would think the person who did was bizarre. But Billy Pilgrim didn’t realize that he read the book before when he was at a veteran hospital. When Billy Pilgrim was a prisoner of war he remembers that
All the tragic events in war that he had to deal with, such as seeing people get killed and wondering why he got picked to live have tainted his life . For Billy, traveling in the Tralfamadorian world, makes him relief of his guilt, such as mentioned of what Billy wants to be written on his tombstone, "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt"[p.122]. Billy’s trauma is so severe that he has to leave earth to heal. Tralfamadorian’s believe that time does not go forward and we cannot die. Billy believes that this can comfort those of the earth that are afraid of death. The other dimension that Billy had got his ideas of forth dimension and Trafamadorians are by the science fiction book of Kilgore Trout. One big evidence that came from Tout’s novel that demonstrates that Billy is lying is when he finds one of Trout’s books that he has never read before. "He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before-years ago, in the veteran’s hospital. It was about an Earthling ma and women who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon212". [p.201] This Kilgore Trout book is the foundation of his imaginary world. As I have mentioned earlier, Billy starts time traveling after
... 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.
Kurt Vonnegut has built a universe for Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five where Billy’s cruel, unforgiving reality is contrasted by a philosophical utopia where he has learned to operate without the pains of being human. Within this self-described ‘telegraphic’ and ‘schizophrenic’ novel, Vonnegut manages to swing the reader halfway across the galaxy to a planet inhabited by a plunger-like race called the Tralfamadorians, take them into the harrowing depths of a POW camp, and show you a man who is increasingly coming undone at the seams after having lived with the psychological terrors of the Dresden bombing. He accomplishes all of this while only leaving the reader with a slight case of jet lag and hopefully a new perspective on the American lifestyle. It does not change the way you think. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations.
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.
Vonneguts character Billy is showing frequent signs of mental illness throughout the book. Most of the chapters show his delusions in the repeated use of the extraterrestrials, the Tralfamadorians. Many scenes from his travels with the aliens can be seen in different parts of his life that Billy may not have realized he had seen and taken to insert into his own imaginary delusions. Vonnegut gives us many scenes to prove that the Tralfamadorians are just a construct of Billy’s broken mind through the use of Kilgore Trout's science fiction novels and other pieces of his life.
Billy is used to showing that everything happens because of fate. As a prisoner, Billy has no control over his day to day life. While Billy is in Dresden, the city is bombed, because of luck, only Billy and a few others survive the bombing in a slaughterhouse. The people of Tralfamadore tell Billy that humans do not understand time because everything they do is in singular progression.
There is a fine line between sanity and insanity, a line that can be crossed or purposefully avoided. The books The Things They Carried and Slaughterhouse-Five both explore the space around this line as their characters confront war. While O’Brien and Vonnegut both use repetition to emphasize acceptance of fate, their characters’ psychological and internal responses to war differ significantly. In The Things They Carried, the narrator and Norman Bowker carry guilt as evidence of sanity. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim and the innkeepers carry on with life in order to perpetuate sanity. Both authors develop a distinct theme of responding in the face of the insanity of war.
For survivors of traumatic events, the trauma itself is often only the beginning. While some are relatively unaffected, many others will develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, an affliction that haunts its victims with terrifying memories, nightmares, and panic attacks. (For a comprehensive list of symptoms and diagnostic criteria, the reader may refer to the DSM-IV, relevant portions of which may be found online (7).) The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 3.6 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 54 suffer from PTSD; 30 percent of those who have spent time in war zones - one million veterans of Vietnam alone - are affected (6). PTSD is treated with several forms of psychotherapy, including exposure therapy, centered around a controlled confrontation of frightening stimuli. While medication may treat co-occurring depression, anxiety, or insomnia (6), pharmacological agents targeting PTSD remain unavailable. In part, this is because researchers have only begun to describe the underlying neurobiology. Several recent studies have pointed to the brain structure known as the amygdala as a central player, but questions remain: How does this small structure "recognize" danger? How does it create emotional memories? What causes recurrence of these memories?
With people who are suffering from PTSD their brain is still in overdrive long after the trauma has happened. They may experience things like flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations, panic attacks, and deep depression. They tend to avoid things that remind them of their trauma and are constantly on high alert waiting for the next possible traumatic event to take place; in events such...
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.
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 ...
This world and its beliefs provide Billy with a way to escape the mental prison of his mind where even the sound of sirens caused him great distress. From the chronology to the diminishing reaction to the important moments in his life, Billy’s life becomes completely chaotic and meaningless, but he would not prefer any other alternative because this was the only one which was mentally