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How Does Kurt Vonnegut Use Ptsd In Slaughterhouse Five

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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 …show more content…

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

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This shows that Billy was completely sane because the time travels, the coping method, and the events he had experienced. In the beginning of the story, Billy seemed like he was doing okay. He was going to write a book about what happened when he was in the war in Dresden, studying to be an anthropologist, meeting with his

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867 Words | 4 Pages

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day” (Vonnegut 23). Billy can go from being a prisoner in war to on a planet called Zircon-212. That was the planet he would frequently visit and stay in a zoo there. He bounces in and out of so many times in his life. Half way through the book he flashes to the day he dies, but since he is unstuck in time it really doesn't matter.

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379 Words | 2 Pages

Although Billy Pilgrim shows signs of human qualities, when he is introduced to the Tralfamadorians, he inherits some of their philosophies. Billy explains his newly found beliefs, “the most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die… Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘so it goes’” (Vonnegut 13). While Billy is with the Tralfamadores, he learns to view death as just another moment throughout a person’s life. In The Meaninglessness of Coming Unstuck in Time, Martin Coleman explains, “Billy Pilgrim adopts the Tralfamadorian view of time, he aligns himself with a traditional privileging of knowledge, wrongly understood, over concrete human experiences” (Martin Coleman 689).

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987 Words | 4 Pages

In the novel, Slaughterhouse Five, the author, Kurt Vonnegut uses a very unique way of making his readers both understand and feel Billy Pilgrim’s experiences. He does this by beginning the novel in a somewhat usual way (no novel is ever the same) and then shocks us by making Billy travel through his past and future and his present. Proof of this would be when Billy, on the night of his daughter Bernadette’s wedding, waits an hour to be abducted by the aliens. Then after asking the aliens “why him?” , he is transported to the moment when he and other war prisoners are in a freight car trying to sleep; although Billy sleeps standing because he screams and kicks in his sleep.

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1424 Words | 6 Pages

All of these are just some things that Billy’s suffers symptoms of PTSD. One of the symptoms that Billy Pilgrim that he does show are the Re-experiencing symptoms which according to NIMH include “Flashbacks—reliving the trauma over and over, including physical symptoms like a racing heart or sweating, Bad dreams, and Frightening thoughts” (National Institute of Mental Health, Symptoms) One of the examples is where Billy is when he is trapped in a cart and he then flashes back to " And then Billy was a middle-aged optometrist again, playing hacker's golf this time - on a blazing summer Sunday morning." (Vonnegut,85)

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1482 Words | 6 Pages

The book doesn’t overtly state Billy’s condition, however, it is only amplified as a result of the book’s achronological structure. In showing a nonsequential unfolding of events, Vonnegut wishes to unmoor the reader from their preconceived notions just as Billy is unmoored from time and he makes the effect of how war trauma affects an individual’s psyche quite clear through Billy’s example. It is through the book’s structure that one can see Billy’s disheveled state after the war. Him coming unstuck in time is a human attempt to rewrite the atrocities he wishes to unsee, and allows a portrayal of war far less glorified, and more real that the “realist narratives” Rigney speaks of. While the random arrival of Tralfamadorians seems as unrealistic as can be, they are essentially a representation of the Germans, and Vonnegut trying to right the wrongs they had committed against him within his own mind.

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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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650 Words | 3 Pages

Billy is the most passive character in the history of literature. Ordinarily, time travel is one of the most exciting superhuman abilities, but in Billy’s case it lets him see the future and let it happen. For example, in the book Billy gets abducted by aliens on his own free will; “ Billy saw the war movie… then it was time to go out into his backyard to meet the flying saucer… He would not raise his eyes to the sky, though he knew there was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore up there. He would see it soon enough, inside and out, and he would see, too, where it came from soon enough-soon enough.”

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Billy Pilgrim has a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder. He shows many of the symptoms when showing the audience of his time travel and the abduction by the Tralfamadorians. Vonnegut never officially states whether or not these events are true or not. Much of the research that

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938 Words | 4 Pages

This scene demonstrates how deeply compassionate Billy truly is towards those around him, despite having already gone through adversity himself which again highlights the main theme throughout the book- resilience in the face of adversity. This is seen most notably during its climax when Trafalmadorians abduct him from Earth; instead of succumbing under their control and accepting whatever happens like other characters do throughout their time travel adventures, it’s noted that “Trafalmadorans [are] learning from [him], since nobody had ever thought about staying alive before "(Vonnegut 147). Then comes Billy’s ultimate sacrifice, accepting death for faith in himself. Ultimately, this leads him back home with an embrace of his own mortality and a reaffirmation of his obsession with his own

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576 Words | 3 Pages

In this story, Billy Pilgrim is a time traveler, causing all methods of time to be insignificant. Adding time travel causes for the removal of foreshadowing. It is also made clear that there is no freewill, causing there to be no changes in his time travel. The first chapter of this novel is Vonnegut explaining to the reader his process of writing this book.

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1246 Words | 5 Pages

Whenever Billy engages with the Trafalmadorians, he seems to be time traveling as well. His mind is playing countless games on him, similar to patients who experience PTSD. As the American Psychiatric Association previously described, patients who experience PTSD can experience many different forms of PTSD. A niche category of PTSD includes the development of mental hallucinations while dissociating from a specific situation; which seems to be the category of PTSD that Billy is

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886 Words | 4 Pages

Vonnegut’s Postmodern Journey Through Time Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a postmodern American novel about World War II. The senselessness of war is a theme and part of what made it popular during the protest era of the Vietnam War (Vitale). The novel begins with an introduction by the author that explains why, and how, his war book came to be. This is not the last time Vonnegut inserts himself into his book––he is an unstable narrator that makes cameo appearances throughout the story, but the main protagonist is a man named Billy Pilgrim who became “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 1). The story is told in a random series of vignettes as Pilgrim travels from one moment in his life to the next, and this fragmented style is common in postmodern fiction (Fatma 83).

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1087 Words | 5 Pages

'' Bill has gone to sleep as a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He walked through a door in 1955 and came out of another one in 1941" ( Vonnegut 23) Billy is often described as traveling through time, but in reality, he is suffering from PTSD and is trying to deal with his trauma from the war. '' According to plan, the barbershop quartet of optometrists, ''The Fedbs, sang while other people drank. Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. '

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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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