How Does Kurt Vonnegut Use Ptsd In Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five follows the life of a man named Billy Pilgrim. Billy shares three important traits with his creator: they both fought in World War 2, they both were prisoners of war, and they both lived to tell the tale. This is where their similarities end, however, as Billy Pilgrim was also abducted by aliens and experiences sudden and involuntary time travel. At least, that is what Billy claims. Though it is never explicitly said in the book, Billy's strange encounters are reflections of his trauma from the war and the ways he learns to cope. Instead of telling the story of a veteran moving on from war in the "normal" way, Vonnegut uses the phenomena of time travel and alien abduction as a way to transport readers into

One of the side effects of the disorder is While Billy believes that he is "unstuck in time", there is evidence to support the idea that these spontaneous trips through time are actually violent and unwanted flashbacks to the war. The narrator of the story even doubts Billy's credibility, following "Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day...He has seen his birth and death many times, and pays random visits to all the events in between", with a skeptical, "He says" (Vonnegut 23). From the beginning of the book, the narrator plants the seed of question; is Billy really experiencing these things? Another piece of evidence comes when Billy hears a Barbershop quartet sing a song that feels oddly familiar. When he finally makes the connection, "he did not travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly" (Vonnegut 177). For the first time in the book, a distinction is made between Billy time traveling back to the war and simply remembering it. Hearing this song, which he had once heard shortly after the tragic bombing of Dresden, reminded Billy of his experience. This cause-and-effect scenario is different than the seemingly random time traveling episodes that the story consists of. Instead of staying trapped in his mind, "time traveling" from event to event, the song snaps Billy awake. While troubling thoughts of the war often consume Billy's mind, in

As Billy explains it, Tralfamadorians, from the planet Tralfamadore, came to Earth to kidnap him and put him in a zoo so that the curious alien race could observe a human being. While in their captivity, they tell him that unlike humans, who experience life from beginning to end, Tralfamadorians see all time at once. One of his abductors says to him, "All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber" (Vonnegut 86). Though Billy introduces it as a literally alien concept, this extraterrestrial experience may be a metaphor for how the war made him feel hopeless and small. The lack of free will in the Tralfamadorian way of living is a reflection of Billy's life as a prisoner of war. While initially discouraging, there is a degree of liberation in the absence of choice. Billy begins to understand and even appreciate this when he learns about Tralfamadorian books, in which "there isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep" (Vonnegut 88). This more positive perspective shows that Billy finds