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Point Of View In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

1444 Words6 Pages

Lilia Bieker
M. Segovia
AP English IV - 7th
1 April 2018
Vonnegut’s Perspective in Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut’s work, Slaughterhouse five, is a story of Billy Pilgrim, for the most part a non-heroic character, who goes through a violent and ever changing experience when drafted into the army as an American soldier for World War II. Experiencing the harsh bombings of Dresden, Germany, Billy survives and is stuck living a life in which he “travels” back and forth in time, visiting his past, present, and future in burstful, out of sequence moments. With the help of psychoanalytic criticism, Vonnegut guides his own point of view through Billy Pilgrim, to express his strong opinion of deromanticizing war. Vonnegut expresses that men are …show more content…

He put on the little overcoat, too. It split up the back, and, at the shoulders, the sleeves came entirely free. So the coat became a fur-collared vest. It was meant to flare at its owner 's waist, but the flaring took place at Billy 's armpits. The Germans found him to be one of the most screamingly funny things they had seen in all of World War II. They laughed and laughed.” (Vonnegut, 90)
Kurt includes this dark humor to contradict the importance of war and emphasize the absurdness of how war really is. How Billy Pilgrim is completely unbothered by the clothes he is given to wear and clueless as to why the German soldiers are laughing mocks the seriousness of war itself. War is seen as a prideful journey that soldiers endure and Vonnegut creates these implications to add an embarrassing humor. This shows Vonnegut’s intentions of showing how war is not all that it seems and how it breaks down a person’s self-esteem and …show more content…

Billy claims that all these events are true and lives by what the Tralfamadorians teach him about life, but in reality is all made up in his head. It is implied throughout the novel that Billy Pilgrim suffers from post traumatic stress disorder after he returns from the war. His first experience with this unknown planet is on the night of his daughter’s wedding, where he believes “He hadn’t been missed, he said, because the tralfamadorians had taken him through a time warp, so that he could be on Tralfamadore for years, and still be away from Earth for only a microsecond.” (Vonnegut, 26). Sadly, this shows it is all made up in Billy’s head. Later in the novel, the readers are able to connect where Billy had gotten the idea of the world from when Billy read a book while recovering at the veterans’ hospital. The book was about a Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extraterrestrials on a planet called Zircon212 written by Kilgore Trout, which is he whole basis for Billy’s belief in the Traflamadorians. This proves that his PTSD made him believe the book was real and apart of his reality when in truth it was just a way for his mind to cope with the difficulty of living after the war. War caused Billy to lose a sense of what was real and

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The battle results in fierce fighting and then the he is haunted due to the journey of war and its circumstances is increased by the events, which causes other events to occur in an unchronological manner. Firstly, Billy Pilgrim becomes acquainted with, and a friend to a fellow POW, a colonel who lost his entire regiment throughout the course of the fighting of the Battle of the Bulge (Vonnegut, 67). The second is the death of an arrogant soldier, Roland Weary, who looked after Pilgrim on the their march with the other soldiers to act as a heroic person. Weary stayed behind with Pilgrim during their trek and therefore blames Billy Pilgrim for his death; he died of gangrene that had started in his mangled feet (Vonnegut 35). The first experience shows him what Acute Stress Disorder can do to the mind, what it can do to a person on the last straws of their life(PTSD: National Center for PTSD).

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