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How Does Billy Pilgrim Use Ptsd In Slaughterhouse Five

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What is the cost of war? Millions of people have died for their country, or a different cause, without being able to say goodbye to their loved ones. Those who do return to their homes after the war, suffer from not only physical, but emotional and psychological scars. In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, a veteran who struggles with PTSD, believes he is traveling in time. In one second Billy could be in his office as an optometrist, the next he could be fighting in the war. Billy “time travels” as far back as his birth, which a normal person would never be able to remember. The style Kurt Vonnegut uses makes it difficult to understand if the novel is anti-war. Nonetheless, Kurt Vonnegut employs Billy Pilgrim’s “time …show more content…

It is even impossible for Billy to know where he’s going. Billy “has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun” (Vonnegut 23). Along with not being able to choose where he travels, Billy was unable to change the course of action at that time, he can only simply act out his part. This evidence demonstrates that these time travelling episodes are actually flashbacks, a common symptom of PTSD. These flashbacks are almost movie like, according to Billy “he never knows what part he is going to have to act in next”(Vonnegut 23). The scripted “time travels” of Billy Pilgrim support the argument that Billy is not actually travelling in …show more content…

Their similarities between his story and the war come as short interchangeable sentences, such as when Billy is abducted by the Tralfamadorians. Billy asks the Tralfamadorians why they have chosen him, philosophically they respond “Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything?” (Vonnegut 76). And later in the book, when Billy is captured by the Germans, he hears a fellow soldier ask his same question, the guard’s response is similar to the response of the Tralfamadorians, “Vy you? Vy anybody?” (Vonnegut 91). This resemblance of the two responses reassures that the Tralfamadorians are not real creatures, but representations of what Billy remembers from the

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no this isn’t the case. Billy is not actually experiencing reality, but instead what Billy is suffering from is a coping mechanism from the condition known as PTSD. Billy uses these jumps into different times, and places from his past to cope with his traumatic stress that he received from the war that he was drafted into. PTSD is a condition linked to events that have happened in peoples lives that aren't exactly enjoyable memories, but rather the opposite. This case becomes present in people who have gone through traumatic experiences.

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Billy Pilgrim was an ex-soldier who had experienced very harsh events which caused him to get stuck in time and revisit them. Revisiting time can cause one to ignore and find the mishaps and the happiness of life meaningless. 　　 　　Tralfamadorians’s ideas of this phrase was that even though one can die, events in that person’s life can be visited many times only through the invention of time travel. Being unstuck in time, Billy can visit the many events in his life including his death. Due to being unstuck in time makes Billy careless about the importance of life, death, and time.

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In the book slaughterhouse five by Kurt vonnegut, there are many deaths that contribute to the book’s meaning as a whole, it represents how death is something that takes place in everyone's lives. Vonnegut writes “so it goes” after every death or near death experience that a character in the book encounters to show how inevitable death is. Vonnegut explains, “The plane crashed on top of sugarbush mountain, in vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes” (25).

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Roland Weary is a prime example of Kurt Vonnegut pointing out the glorification of war. Weary saves Billy Pilgrim's life many times not out of the greater good, but to fulfil his perception that he is a war hero. "He don't want to live, but he's gonna live anyway. When he gets out of this, by God, he's gonna owe his life to the three musketeers" (Vonnegut 61). He saves Billy despite his resistence because he believes he's owed something for doing so, that he deserves praise for not letting Billy die.

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Billy from the book Slaughterhouse-five made it seem like time was irrelevant, and made it seem like the war he was in was not relevant. He claims he travels through time and space so freely which was not possible in the 1940’s. He was not traveling through time he was having vivid flashbacks of the war, and adding his vivid imagination. I believe that his interactions with the tralfamadorians was his imagination and also a copy of the Germans in a way. Billy claimed that he had encounters with aliens called the tralfamadorians which do a lot of what the Germans do.

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1366 Words | 6 Pages

Some experiences, like the sudden unexpected death of a loved one, can also cause PTSD” (National Institute of Mental Health, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”). PTSD, like many other diseases, can arise from a number of conditions, making it hard to pinpoint where it stems from. Vonnegut takes into account that PTSD can come from a number of sources, providing a plethora of possible explanations for Billy’s mental capacity throughout the novel. For instance, early in Billy’s life, Billy, along

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641 Words | 3 Pages

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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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