A Look into the Human Mind
In his powerful novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut tells of a man named Billy Pilgrim who has become unstuck in time. He walks through a door in 1955 and comes out another in 1941. He crashes in a plane in 1968 and ends up displayed in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore making love to Earth porno-star, Montana Wildhack. He ends up in the cellar of a slaughterhouse when Dresden is bombed to ashes during World War II; Billy, his fellow Americans, and four guards were the only ones to live through the bombing. The Boston Globe best explains the book when it says it is “…poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement” (back cover). Vonnegut looks into the human mind of a man, traumatized by war experiences and poor relations with his father, and determines insanity is the result.
Billy’s father is a source of his instability from the beginning. Mr. Pilgrim treats Billy as if he has no feelings and he is a disgrace to him. Unfortunately for Billy, fathers are very influential in a boy’s growing up. In a terrible encounter with his father when Billy was young, Mr. Pilgrim sets the stage for Billy’s insanity:
Little Billy was terrified because his father had said Billy was going to learn to swim by the method of sink-or-swim. His father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim. It was like an execution. Billy was numb as his father carried him from the shower room to the pool. His eyes were closed. When he opened his eyes, he was on the bottom of the pool and there was beautiful music playing everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the music went on. He dimly sensed that someone was rescuing him. Billy resented that. (43-4)
Billy is also traumatized by the extreme loss in his life. Everywhere he looks, he experiences great loss. First his father dies in a hunting accident, then he gets in a plane crash and everyone aboard dies but him, and while he is in the hospital recuperating, his wife dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. There is so much death surrounding his life, that it is no wonder Billy has not tried to kill himself yet.
Billy proves throughout the book that he is not mentally stable, yet somehow, he is persuasive in his interpretation of the truth.
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.
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
"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.' "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions.New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age. '"Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure.
Billy has a history of mental problems he has been institutionalized twice. The first time was when he father died this was while he was in training, before he went off to war. The second time was when he came back from the war. Plus he had the head injury from the plane crash. He only started talking about the Tralfamadorians after the plane. And it's odd that every thing about the Tralfamadorians is from those good old Kilgore Trout novels. Now remember Billy first started to read Trout's novels when he committed himself, this was second time he was in the nut house it was after the war. The whole notion of time, the zoo, even the looks of the creatures were all in Trout's novels.
Many people are intrigued by Kurt Vonnegut’s borderline sci-fi, anti-war book Slaughterhouse-Five, and how it has survived throughout the ages. Kurt Vonnegut is an innovative best selling, award winning author of many book such as; Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-Five etc.The book Slaughterhouse-Five has no beginning, middle or end past the first chapter so it is very common for Billy Pilgrim to “time bounce” from his childhood, to the war, and to his elderly years and not all in that order. Billy Pilgrim is a man that did not have the greatest luck when it came to being a soldier.For instance “He was a scrawny, untrained private with scraps for a uniform such a creature could walk through war, oblivious yet unscathed, while so many others with more appropriate attire and provisions perish”(Sparknotes Editor). Mr. Vonnegut lived through some of the events portrayed in the book Slaughterhouse-Five such as the American air raid of Dresden, Germany. On February 13-14, 1945 nearly 135,000 Germans were killed from the tragic firebombing of the city of Dresden,Germany. In the book Billy claims to have lived this tragic event several times over. Mr. Vonnegut was a soldier of the 423rd Infantry Regiment, and 106 Infantry Division and earned a Purple Heart for his service after being injured at the Battle of The Bulge (Vonnegut.com). Many soldier in our day and age that fought in WWII and after have suffered from PTSD. An estimated 7.8 percent of Americans will experience PTSD at some point in their lives, with women (10.4%) twice as likely as men (5%) to develop PTSD. About 3.6 percent of U.S. adults aged 18 to 54 (5.2 mil...
The main event that leads Billy to all his confusion is the time he spent in Dresden and witnessed the fire-bombings that constantly pop in his head along with pictures of all the innocent people Billy saw that fled to Dresden the "safe spot" from the war before the bombing. When Billy sees the faces of the innocent children it represents his fear of the situation. Billy can't acknowledge the fact that they were innocent and they were killed by Americans, Americans soldiers just like himself. The biggest issue Billy cannot come to grasp with is why the bombings took place. That question has no answer; it's just something that happened that Billy couldn't get over. During all Billy's travels back to Dresden he couldn't change what had really happened there although that was the closure he was looking for. Dresden purely represents Bill's past and fears of the truth about what happened.
Because he cannot control time travel, Billy is forced to relive again and again some of the most painful parts of his life. For example, Edgar Derby, his wartime father-figure, is senselessly executed by the Germans for stealing a teapot, while Valencia Pilgrim, his own wife, dies accidentally from carbon monoxide poisoning after her car's exhaust system is damaged in an accident. Barbara Greeley has observed that the effect of having to witness these events over and over is that "Billy becomes emotionally desensitized to human suffering and death, and is thus robbed of compassion" (3). Her point is well taken, for without this human emotion Billy is reduced to the level of an unfeeling machine. On the planet Tralfamadore where Billy is taken after he is kidnapped by extraterrestrials, his machine-like response to suffering and death grows only worse.
Billy never in the book tries to stop a bad moment because of no free will. Kurt Vonnegut uses a phrase throughout the book to show this idea. The phrase is “ So it goes”. Vonnegut uses this phrase after many situations such as people dieing because in life thats jus how it goes essentially. You cannot change life, it happens and you have to live with it. So it goes Billy dies. So it goes Paul Lazzaro kills him. So it goes the plane he’s on crashes and he knows it is going to crash. So it goes the people of Dresden are bombed. So it goes Billy is caught in a war. Life goes and we cannot question it. We can only live in the moments we get. Some of these moments will be bad, life will be lost. But you must live as Billy does and not question these events because there is no changing them. Even through reliving these moments Billy could still not change them. Tralfamador’s culture shapes Billys entire outlook on life. There way of life rubs off on Billy. No free will controls Billys whole life. He is just a man with his memories stuck on shuffle not sure what he’s getting next, but never questioning the moment he does get only living that moment as if its the last moment he will
Overall Billy is treated very badly by his family and teachers bar Mr Farthing who acts as a sort of father figure towards Billy, Mr Farthing is also the only one who takes any interest in Billy’s talents and interests. As I said before Billy is most certainly an underdog but that just helps the reader feel for him even more because you can empathise with Billy in some way or another.
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
He marries the daughter of the owner of the school and immediately becomes overwhelmingly wealthy. Being handed so much money Billy was finally able to control his own fate. Yet still feeling powerless in his own life after the war, Billy has a mental break and admits himself into a psychiatric ward where he voluntarily goes through electric shock therapy. Billy still being very naïve after the war took the end of his childhood is unaware of why he still feels so powerless with his fate even though he has the money and power to do what he pleases. Billy’s mind tries correcting itself and causes Billy to have flashbacks, or as he refers to them as time traveling, and
Also certainly an indication that Billy has little control over his life and the things that happen in it is the fact that he cannot control where he will jump in time. He makes it known early in the novel that he has the ability to jump around to different areas of time, but that it is not an ability that he is able to control. Whether he goes forward or backward in time, or to a pleasant or unpleasant moment, is not chosen by Billy it happens at random. Also, despite the fact that he can go back in time he cannot change anything that has already happened.
A transaction process system (TPS) is an information processing system for business transactions involving the collection, modification and retrieval of all transaction data.(Techopedia.com, 2017)
- A Transaction Processing System (TPS) is an organized collection of people, procedures, databases, hardware and software to record completed business transactions.
Information is collected but not processed immediately. In other way, it is an efficient way of processing high volumes of data where a group of transactions is collected over a period of time. Data is collected, entered and processed, then only the batch results will be obtained. Each step is done separately for the input, process and output. Data collected is prepared for input as a single unit and the updating takes place when it is scheduled or sufficient of data.