Examples Of PTSD In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

The psyche is a phenomenon that we as humans barely understand. The brain controls every action, from the most basic to the very advanced. As people grow, so do their minds, shaped by their surroundings and the various events they experience. One of these very influential events is war: a rampant atrocity that forces people to make morally questioning decisions. War is a contributing factor to the growing rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is defined as “an anxiety disorder that is triggered by an event such as violence, a car accident, a natural disaster, and more” (Goldberg). Many soldiers experience this disease as they return from the war zone and have been, up until recently, brushed aside with an illness known as “shell-shock,"

How one deals with the illness is often influenced by how they dealt with childhood traumas. This is evident in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut relays his wartime experiences onto the fictional character of Billy Pilgrim, who experiences a trauma at the community YMCA at a very young age. In his novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien also tells the story of a young man by the same name and his ordeals during and post war. Tim, like Billy, faces a trauma as a young child that helped shape the way he would later deal with war. Through their characters, Billy and Tim,Vonnegut and O’Brien assert that one’s ability to cope with the traumas of adulthood heavily depends on their ability to recover from childhood

While fighting in Europe, Billy is taken as a prisoner of war and sent to a work area in Dresden, Germany. He witnesses this amazingly developed city turn into rubble with the fatal firebombing of Dresden. However, this is not the first trauma that Billy encounters. As a young boy, Billy visits the Illium YMCA with his father, who believes he will “learn to swim by the sink-or-swim method” (Vonnegut 43). Unfortunately for Billy, this did not work as he sank to “the bottom of the pool” and “lost consciousness” (Vonnegut 44). It is easy to say that this event in Billy’s life was a traumatic one, and obviously one he thinks about often, since he decides to “travel” back to it. It is possible that Billy was unable to fully understand what this event did to him and with this, is unable find closure with it. This, in a way, foreshadows into Billy’s life as an adult and his ability to deal with adulthood traumas, such as WWII and more specifically the firebombing of Dresden. Childhood trauma is a risk factor which “makes a person more likely to develop PTSD” (National Institute of Mental Health). Since Billy was unable to develop the skills necessary to get past trauma as a child, and therefore