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Billy Pilgrim's Healthy Confusion In Slaughterhouse-Five

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Healthy Confusion

Healthy confusion is described as a feeling of pleasure and uneasiness. This is placed in many novels to keep a reader interested. One novel that provides a healthy confusion is Slaughterhouse - Five. This particular writing keeps the reader constantly enthused whilst also being slightly disturbed. Slaughterhouse - Five is about a man named Billy Pilgrim who claims he can time travel in his mind. Billy is captured in Germany during the second world war and the novel is the story of his journey all the way from the battle fields, to prisoner camps, and finally to the moment of freedom and survival of him and 99 other men as the town of Dresden, where they are last stationed, is blown to bits by the US Armed Forces with nearly no survivors. There are many cases of healthy confusion in this novel, such as when Billy Pilgrim travels in time, when he claims he was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, and when he escapes the ashed ruins of Dresden, Germany. …show more content…

This simply confuses the reader because it takes the story off track and really makes them wonder what is really going on. Although, this simultaneously entertains the reader as they are wondering how, in many cases, the situation will resolve. Billy was then captured by Germans with a war partner, Roland Weary. The place he most often travels is his office of optometry, and this is where he goes. In his mind, he is now trying to stay awake while taking care of a patient, but in the readers’ mind, they are experiencing that healthy confusion. In one part of their mind, the reader is worried about what on earth could be happening on the other side with Billy and Weary. As Billy returns to the war, the reader should be relieved to hear he has not been harmed in any way by the German soldiers (Vonnegut 55-58). This is all an interpretation of how a healthy confusion could be

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In chapter one, the narrator comes out and says how it is basically an anti-war book. While following Billy through his time travels, the readers are able to see the war from his point of view. Billy cannot glorify the war in any way. He is in a way thrust into it at first and then he became a prisoner of war.

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Billy in no means was a rambo-esque type bloodthirsty killer, but more the awkward what am I doing here type instead. The innocent optometrist was once again forced into a stressful situation. He was the topic of deliberate bullying from other enlisted men, reasons being from his inability to sleep through the night, which could be linked directly to his traumatic experiences when he was younger, to the fact he couldn't keep up with the other men while participating in physical exercise. This lead to a group of men being killed which i’m sure didn't help bialys conscious. The stress only added up more when Billy had to experience the bombing of the beautiful city of dresden in a meat locker.

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In order to truly understand the significance of Billy Pilgrim's delusion to Slaughterhouse-Five, one must examine it's cause, the delusion itself, and it's justifiability due to the nature of trauma on the human mind. To begin with, war is hell. 1 out of 20 World War II veterans suffered from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (sfgate.com). The bombing of Dresden was so traumatic to Billy that it made him deranged.

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Billy Pilgrim was an outcast due to his body type in the army which was thin with little muscle or definition in his body. Now, he is even more shunned due to his belief in a foreign group of people taking him back to their planet to put him in a zoo with a promiscuous actress. Nobody believes his story when he is speaking on its behalf. The continued transportation to Earth and Tralfamadore create a better relationship between Billy and the people of the planet. This influences the his ideology as mentioned before, but it gives him a place that is said to make him even happier than he is on Earth.

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843 Words | 4 Pages

everybody has their opinion on war and if it's good or bad in society. billy pilgrim's opinion on war it not about if it's good or bad but if it's necessary in human life. in the book slaughterhouse 5 billy's psychological and moral traits are shaped by his experience with war and the tralfamadorians Billy pilgrim is effected by his cultural surrounding that shape his psychological traits. when billy meets the tralfamadorians he learns many thing from their society and culture that changes his beliefs of life. one of the many things he learned was time is divided in particular moments not one constant phenomenon.

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1083 Words | 5 Pages

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a novel that makes no sense in itself; yet, when put into context individually with today’s events, or life’s events in general, makes more sense then if it were clearly spelled out within the pages. Vonnegut introduces protagonist Billy Pilgrim, a schizophrenic man-child, as a unique character who has the ability to become unstuck in time, which means that he can uncontrollably drift from one part of his life to another and “the trips aren’t necessarily fun.” (Vonnegut 23) Travelling between his experience as a prisoner of war in World War II to his suburban family life in the 1950s and 1960s, and his experience as a human specimen in an alien zoo on a distant planet, Billy seemingly has no control over these transitions. Billy handles the tragedies and horrors that surround and threaten to overwhelm him by stopping the clock and moving, in flashbacks or flashforwards,

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In the novel, Slaughterhouse Five, the author, Kurt Vonnegut uses a very unique way of making his readers both understand and feel Billy Pilgrim’s experiences. He does this by beginning the novel in a somewhat usual way (no novel is ever the same) and then shocks us by making Billy travel through his past and future and his present. Proof of this would be when Billy, on the night of his daughter Bernadette’s wedding, waits an hour to be abducted by the aliens. Then after asking the aliens “why him?” , he is transported to the moment when he and other war prisoners are in a freight car trying to sleep; although Billy sleeps standing because he screams and kicks in his sleep.

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1216 Words | 5 Pages

Billy goes through similar experiences that Vonnegut did such as being in war, being overworked in a concentration camp, and being in the middle of the Firebombing of Dresden. Billy had a peaceful life in Ilium New York until he is drafted into war. Even in war, Billy learned how to stay peaceful. Like Vonnegut, Billy never carried a gun and almost froze in the cold climate. At the Battle of the Bulge, Billy and three others were captured and brought to concentration camps.

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Soldiers were not viewed as brave men risking their lives, and the war was seen as an unnecessary event. This type of mentality is seen in the novel with the perceptions of the soldiers. The narrator expresses the view of the time period when he states, “They were soldiers’ coats. Billy was the only one who had a coat from a dead civilian” (82). The meaning behind this is very crucial because it establishes a definite division between soldiers and civilians.

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1162 Words | 5 Pages

Billy is said to become unstuck in time to different events in his life. He flashes to memories of Dresden, which is the war that he participated in. He also has episodes of his flight crash, he knows how he will die, and how his wife dies. This book is so sporadic, the audience never truly knows when this book is taking place in Billy’s life. Each page could contain three or more different events in Billy’s

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Throughout the novel, the series of Macarb conditions in the novel, Billy survived it all with valuable lessons to help him cope and move on a fresh in the new world where “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”. (Vonnegut 122). According to Merriam-Webster Learners Dictionary. Com Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental condition that can affect a person who has had a very shocking or difficult experience such as fighting in a war and that is usually characterized by depression and anxiety. The first symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that Billy exhibits is continuous flashback of the traumatic events in his life.

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Throughout the novel, Billy has specific experiences with horrific warfare

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Furthermore, World War II has not only damaged him physically, but also mentally and has gone straight to his head. For the first time in the novel, Billy Pilgrim remembers a past event rather than time-travelling to it. Time-travel, it seems, would have made the event too immediate, too painful (Harris, Charles

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1189 Words | 5 Pages

Vonnegut follows this up with "Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next", making it clear that the character isn't time travelling willingly. Due to this, the plot is nonlinear and oftentimes spastic in the way that the life experiences happen. Billy Pilgrim seems to floating around in the world, following wherever the wind takes him. The plot always follows Pilgrim's character and so, wherever the time takes Billy Pilgrim next, the reader is taken on the whimsical path with

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How to End a Relationship The top five reasons people end relationships with their partner are lack of trust, lack of growth, falling out of love, unmet needs and insecurity (Pavlina). As you see there are many reasons as to why people want to end a relationship, but one of the main problems is not knowing how to end a relationship. The best way to end a relationship with someone is by being aware of the decision you are about to make, the location that it takes place, how to word it, and how to handle how you and your partner react to this decision.

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