How Does Kurt Vonnegut Use Ptsd In Slaughterhouse Five

Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut, a World War II veteran, the author projects his own experience of assimilating back into society after war onto his characters. Vonnegut uses abstract ideas, symbolism, and allusions to PTSD in order to successfully represent the experiences soldiers suffering with PTSD have after returning home from the war and to demonstrate that even illnesses that don’t have names have hints to their existence, and people’s experiences shine through in what they write. According to Dr. Friedman, an expert in PTSD diagnoses, PTSD became a diagnosis in 1980 after intensive research. Prior to World War II, this illness was known as “shell shock,” while in World War II it would be known as Combat Stress Reaction

He describes that “body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions.And Billy zoomed back in time to his infancy” (Vonnegut 107). In this instance, Billy “time travels” to his childhood, which absolutely juxtaposes this scene prior, in which he is in a place that is stripping him of his innocence. Billy’s time-traveling ability demonstrates his desire to go back to a time when he was innocent, such as childhood, to escape moments that were uncomfortable. This central idea demonstrates Vonnegut’s attempts to create an abstract example of receding into one’s imagination to represent coping mechanisms like escapism. Another instance of Billy’s time travel is when Vonnegut describes him as “spastic in time.He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act on next” (29). The tone of this sentence is inherently anxious, as Billy describes his time travel journeys as being like stage fright, which demonstrates that even when people attempt to escape into their own minds, sometimes it is difficult to filter out the negative