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Slaughterhouse Five Effects Of War Essay

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The Effects of War Throughout history there has been an immense amount of wars. Since World War One which was from 1914-1918 there has been 260 significant wars; one of those wars was World War 2. To be the country we are today it takes many daily sacrifices. In Slaughterhouse Five the main character Billy Pilgrim, is affected mentally, physically, and emotionally from being in war. Being in a war especially World War 2 you see many people die, they can be your friends, family, acquaintances, or even a stranger. All of those deaths do mean something, death is a natural thing that will happen to everyone. Watching people get murdered is definitely something different then you're natural cause of death. It really messes with your head, and the …show more content…

In almost everything he does he is the odd man out. Billy seems like the weird person who just always seems out of place and like he doesn't belong. 1969 was the year that this book was published. PTSD was discovered in 1980, so therefore in the book they couldn't define Billy’s condition. As even in reality they didn't know what it was. PTSD is short for post-traumatic stress disorder. From start to finish of Slaughterhouse Five there are many showings that Billy has PTSD. In this book Billy is “unstuck” in time, but I think that is just how the author portrays his PTSD. In the very beginning of the book Kurt Vonnegut tells us “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. 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. In real life no one is unstuck in time, no matter what. We all live one day at a time and there’s nothing more or less we can do about

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It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist.” The reason Vonnegut included this material in his chapter is to demonstrate that Billy is suffering from the war.it is later proven that if he never went to war, he would have never wept at all. In chapter four page 77, the Tralfamadorians had just taken Billy to a different dimension where he learns a valuable lesson. It states “Well here we are Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

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He travels back and forth in time, visiting his birth, death, all the moments in between repeatedly and out of order. In the story, the author talks about the difficulties of writing the novel and the effects of Dresden on his own life. Billy’s life is given to us out of order, but I will write them to you in order. Billy is born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. As he grows older, he becomes weak and awkward.

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Billy also gets captured by German soldiers and survives a firebombing in Dresden. After the war, Billy goes back to school for Optometry. Billy’s life then begins to disarray when he gets in a plane crash and his wife dies on the same day. Billy also claims that he gets abducted by aliens.

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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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The first detail established in Slaughterhouse-Five is that Billy is “unstuck in time” and cannot focus on a particular day or event (Vonnegut 23). Billy’s time traveling is really his thoughts moving back and forth between the present and the past. Because of his overly active mind, Billy must use a vibrating mattress called the “Magic Fingers” to help him fall asleep (62). Instead of sleeping, he often weeps, which is one of the only times in the book he shows emotion (62). Billy’s lack of emotion can be construed as detachment.

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Throughout the novel, Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim struggles with the hardships that take places all throughout his life. These hardships occur in his family life during World War II and being abducted by aliens from another planet. The misfortunes vary in difficulty, some minor, while some are life and death situations. There are many obstacles that Billy and other men encountered and were faced with, which were separated by every point of life: the past, the present and the future,with the future teaching Billy how to cope with these obstacles. Billy Pilgrim’s past consisted of serving the United States in the Second World War.

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PTSD is a post traumatic stress disorder most veterans get after coming home from war. In the book Slaughterhouse Five it shows how a war veteran has PTSD, shows the reality of war, and how to find a purpose in life. Slaughterhouse Five is a banned book but a reader may believe it should be open to young adults such as teens. They can understand what people go through and they can relate because they all probably have felt sad or depressed at a point in time.

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He struggled for many years trying to figure out why he was one of the ones picked to live. After the war, something strange and extraordinary happened to our protagonist, he was abducted by aliens called the Traflamadorians, who were very mentally and technologically advanced beings. Billy spent much time discussing philosophy with them. A particular philosophy of the Traflamadorians that Billy clung to was the idea that time was the 4th dimension.

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Vonnegut thinks that war is inevitable (Vonnegut 4). Billy knows when he is going to die (Vonnegut 141-142).

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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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It is easy to say that this event in Billy’s life was a traumatic one, and obviously one he thinks about often, since he decides to “travel” back to it. It is possible that Billy was unable to fully understand what this event did to him and with this, is unable find closure with it. This, in a way, foreshadows into Billy’s life as an adult and his ability to deal with adulthood traumas, such as WWII and more specifically the firebombing of Dresden. Childhood trauma is a risk factor which “makes a person more likely to develop PTSD” (National Institute of Mental Health). Since Billy was unable to develop the skills necessary to get past trauma as a child, and therefore

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Yet, the people affected by PTSD still persevere and have hope that they will overcome their difficulties. Kurt Vonnegut uses Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five to show how heavily war can affect people. Billy battles with depression, and this can be seen throughout the novel when he cries for seemingly no reason. That is because he is struggling with PTSD. Under orders

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From the start, Slaughterhouse-Five seems weird, yet the more you read, the more entrancing it becomes. He masterfully merges melancholy and comedy to expose the fact that war is a senseless tragedy plagued by violence, evil, depression, and anxiety. For Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five represented an unholy trinity as it was a metaphor, the main character’s struggle, and Vonnegut’s literal place of shelter during imprisonment. Slaughterhouse-Five is, first of all, where Billy Pilgrim - the main character, winds up during the war; however, it is also the interpretation of what war is; and is, lastly, the place where Vonnegut actually spent several months at the end of World War II. Through metaphors, motifs, and imagery, Vonnegut presents a surprising text that both captivates and baffles its readers.

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The harsh conditions of the camp, including starvation, cold, and the constant fear of death, lead Billy to question the nature of life and death. The traumatic experiences he endures in the camps cause Billy to develop severe mental and emotional issues, including PTSD and a disconnection from reality. The setting of the POW camp serves as a powerful backdrop for Billy’s growing realization of the fragility of life and the inhumanity of war. As a result, he becomes detached from reality, and he begins to believe that he has become “Unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 23). Going to the future and the past Billy sees many deaths along the way reinforcing the idea that death is inevitable, as also Billy is able to witness his own death in the, reinforcing the idea of “So it goes” (Vonnegut 41).

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(27) Vonnegut wants to show that when a moment is gone, it is not gone forever in attempt to prove the theory believed by beings wrong, hence explaining the non linear structure of the book. Through random events that Billy experiences he is always referred to as being “unstuck in time” (23).This phrase is used when Billy randomly travels to different events for example in Ch. 2 he travels to his wedding day. Vonnegut attempts to acknowledge the fact that when he travels to different events in time, they are actually his memories that he travels to and they are not linear but in fact very random which appear and disappear. The events and teachings he learns from the Tralfamadorians lead to Billy’s character

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