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Defense Mechanisms In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

1044 Words5 Pages

In the face of adversity, when life's traumatic circumstances persist, individuals are often left with the burden of many psychological wounds. The trauma left on a person's psyche can make it very difficult to cope with and as a result, they distance themselves from the unpleasantness of the situation through the use of defense mechanisms. Various forms of literature contain characters that exhibit numerous defense mechanisms. In doing so, it enables the readers to utilize the psychoanalytic critical theory lens to depict the elements that encompass said character's personality. One example of this, is the book Slaughterhouse-Five written by Kurt Vonnegut whereby the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is subjected to the incomprehensible horrors …show more content…

In Billy's world, times of hardship are often incomprehensible to his mind; however, through the means of denial, he is able to distort the harsh realities of his life. This enables him to create a psychological barrier to obtain a sense of control over his experiences. Billy’s delusion of being “...unstuck in time” (19) can be interpreted as a form of his denial about normal progression of time and reality. It symbolizes his ability to detach himself from the emotional toll by depicting the memories that help him retreat from the guilt he feels in association with the war. The Tralfamadorians present a seemingly logical perspective surrounding the topic of time and reality by stating, “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time” (38). This message induces conflict between the id and the superego by persuading a change in Billy's perception of realism. The ego however, seeks to satisfy both aspects and in doing so, it persistently resorts to denying the chronological order of his experiences. Billy's manipulation of the defense mechanism denial, alters his behavior by refusing to acknowledge actualism and naturally occurring time to protect his

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1043 Words | 5 Pages

The Tralfalmadorians’ belief in fate demonstrates the idea that one should accept the things that cannot be changed. When Billy is abducted by these aliens, they explain to Billy that there is no such thing as free will. The aliens are able to see into the fourth dimension, where “‘[all] events are structured’” or preordained (Vonnegut 85). They believe that no one has control over his or her destiny because the future always exists a certain way. Billy uses this philosophy to help himself cope with the realities of death and war.

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Albeit, Billy's coping mechanism is a negative one, it worked for him. He is disassociated from reality because he truly believes the Tralfamadorian philosophy of "All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist." (27) The bombing of Dresden happened, and since it happened, it has always happened that way and always will happen that way. At least, that's what the Tralfamadorians think.

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Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut intertwines reality and fiction to provide the reader with an anti-war book in a more abstract form. To achieve this abstraction, Kurt Vonnegut utilizes descriptive images, character archetypes, and various themes within the novel. By doing so, he created a unique form of literature that causes the reader to separate reality from falsehood in both their world, and in the world within Vonnegut’s mind. Vonnegut focuses a lot on the characters and their actions in “Slaughterhouse Five.”

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778 Words | 4 Pages

Billy relives many flashbacks to when he fought in the War, and the firebombing of Dresden. One of Billy’s flashbacks takes place during the war when Billy gets captured by the German soldiers. Billy joins a group during World War II. There he meets a man named Roland Weary and two regimental scouts. As Billy starts to lag behind the other three man, Weary begins to give Billy a hard time and informs him to keep up.

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1195 Words | 5 Pages

The scripted “time travels” of Billy Pilgrim support the argument that Billy is not actually travelling in

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504 Words | 3 Pages

For example, he never knew if he would be suffering in the POW camp in Germany, performing an eye examine on a child who recently lost his father in the war, or going on his honeymoon with his wife. By using those examples in the book, it made Billy seem like he really had no control of his time periods and was actually “unstuck in

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957 Words | 4 Pages

The planet acts as an escape for Billy and an easier way to cope with the war. Near the end of the novel the reader finds out that the planet of Tralfamadore and all of Billy’s experiences there are nearly identical to the plot of Kilgore Trout science fiction novel that he use to read all the time. Billy has taken something familiar to him and turned it into something that can control his anxiety. The Tralfamadorians story also helps Billy make sense of all the death around him. Billy finds “the most important thing [he] learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die” (Vonnegut 183).

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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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1077 Words | 5 Pages

Trout uses science fiction and its different elements such as cognitive estrangement and structural fabulation in order to build a metaphor that guides the reader into thinking about an aspect of society that the author wants to criticize. This communicative piece intends to portray social criticism in the way Vonnegut does it, but taken to our reality and analyzing aspects we want to condemn. We opened the book on chapter nine and decided to write our own new plot as if Billy Pilgrim was the one reading it. We wrote the text and inserted it as part of the chapter in order to adhere it to the rest of society’s criticism seen in the book in the very best Vonnegut style. In order to interpret Vonnegut’s intentions and purpose of social criticism throughout Slaughterhouse Five, specially in chapter nine, it´s necessary to understand science fiction and its elements.

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Throughout history, many crucial events have touched numerous people in their own way, one of these events being World War II. This war impacted countless people who were affected by the horrendous things that Germany ensued. One person that was impacted by World War II is Kurt Vonnegut. From his experiences in the war, he has written multiple books, one of his books being about his involvement in the Dresden firebombing. Within the book, he uses different literary devices that reflect this historical event.

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845 Words | 4 Pages

Time to Tralfamadorians is an enigma because they can experience past, present, and future all at once. This causes him to grapple with the ability to change or even to accept changes as they occur. He states, “Among the things that Billy could not change were the past, the present, and the future” (55). All of this after observing the Serenity prayer on Billy’s wall that read, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference” (54). Essentially, he cannot change what has already happened to him and realizes that he literally has no free

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441 Words | 2 Pages

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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Furthermore, Billy is not in control of his destiny; every facet of his life has been influenced by someone from his Chaplin assistant job n the military, his employment as an optometrist, and his marriage to his boss’ daughter. An example of acceptance is when his

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1189 Words | 5 Pages

How did Kurt Vonnegut use postmodern approaches to create an antiwar antinovel in Slaughterhouse 5? When Slaughterhouse 5 was published, it could have been considered as an outsider in the literary world. In the midst of the Vietnam war, it was preaching antiwar notions, and in a time where straightforward linear storylines dominated the media, Slaughterhouse 5 presented a challenging nonlinear plot. The nonlinearity in plots would later on become a staple of postmodern literature but Kurt Vonnegut missed the peak of the postmodern era publishing the novel in 1969; a decade before the peak in the 1980's.

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Storytelling has been the epitome of human expression for thousands of years. Along with musicians and artists, talented storytellers use their work to share ideas with others, often in an effort to evoke emotion or to persuade people to think similarly. Every element in a story is carefully crafted by the author in order to communicate a desired message to his or her audience. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut incorporates irony into the story to express his belief that fighting wars is illogical.

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