Slaughterhouse-Five Book Report

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In Slaughterhouse Five, we learn that Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time,” finding himself randomly jumping from time period to time period, reliving events from his past and traveling to the present time. When Billy Pilgrim first gets abducted by the Tralfamadorians, he learns how they see life. In the fourth dimension, all of life’s events are happening simultaneously.To Tralfamadorians, life has no beginning, middle or an end, because everything is happening all at the same time. And Billy’s time traveling is him experiencing how Tralfamadorians see time. The book itself is an embodiment of Tralfamadorian time because the time traveling causes the book to not have a steady timeline, where all events are in random periods of time, but it’s a good way of portraying the hard-to-portray concept that everything is …show more content…

In this case the past is war filled with acts of cruelty that will be forever occurring. This brings in an important theme which is memory, which I think is the main purpose this book was written, Billy has experienced the bombing of Dresden and couldn’t handle the trauma he is experiencing from all the death. It is likely that Billy has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which is a psychiatric disorder that affects someone who has experienced a terrifying event that haunts them through nightmares or flashbacks. All the time traveling that Billy supposedly done could have been just flashbacks from the war that he himself can’t let go off, because as the Tralfamadorians said, all events are occurring at the same time and will always be happening. Meaning that the war is still happening for him, in his mind. Billy “leaps” back in Dresden a lot and this is just to show that Dresden is still in his mind and he’s still reliving it all in his

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