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Summary Of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

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Slaughterhouse Five Synopsis: The protagonist of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”, Billy Pilgrim, is “unstuck in time.” The novel, in no particular order, details Billy’s life from his basic education to his death. During that time, he goes to war where he experiences being a POW. When he comes back, he gets married and raises two children with his wife. He nearly dies in a plane crash and then his wife is subjected to accidental death on her way to visit him. Despite expectation otherwise, Billy is able to emotionally separate himself from these tragedies and regard all the senseless violence in his life as simply different periods of time through his science fiction experience with the “Tralfamadorians” who allegedly abduct him. Praise and …show more content…

She is taken in by a local family, but eventually goes back to live with her abusive parents. Pecola’s parents hate themselves and each other which is expressed in equal measures of violence and neglect. Pecola is raped by her father and impregnated, but the child does not survive premature birth. Eventually, Pecola pleads with a town mystic to grant her wish of having blue eyes, believing this “mark of beauty” will finally earn her the love she so desperately craves. Pecola finally loses her sanity, believing her wish granted, and spends the rest of her life in a world of fantasy on the edge of …show more content…

The book outlines all the ways in which the two penguins behave just like all the other penguin mates behave between each other. They spend time together, they groom each other, they feed each other, etc. The book hits its conflict when the penguins are surrounded by other couples who are laying eggs and hatching them. The males procure a large rock as a stand-in, but it obviously isn’t the same. Instead, they are given an abandoned egg which they successfully care for and hatch together. The baby is named “Tango” and the little penguin family continues to function just like the other penguin

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Kurt Vonnegut hides this truth in the book because war tends to depict death as common and normal, and this is how BIlly perceives it; rather than death being a morbid and sorrowful occurrence in people's life. Billy hides from the idea of death rather than faces it for what it actually

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In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five the author begins with a struggle of remembrance of the things that were experienced while in Dresden but soon finds a way to explain through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim. Billy is introduced and recalls his time in Dresden much of which he spent abducted by aliens known as Tralfamadorians, the Tralfamadorians are described as having plunger bodies and have eyes that are in the palm of their hands. Along with having a physical difference from humans they also have different ways of how their society runs and their philosophical views. The input of the Tralfamadorians is a way for the author to question the idea of whether free will exists or not and challenges the idea for humans. The idea of free will is used

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Billy’s Coping Mechanisms Billy Pilgrim, the main character of Slaughterhouse Five, was a survivor of the destruction in Dresden during World War II and a Prisoner of War. As a result of the effects of having been a Prisoner of War, and having been a witness to the full immensity of destruction, it can be inferred that Billy Pilgrim suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder throughout the novel, which caused him to examine the events of war over and over throughout the course of his life. In order to comprehend how these components, witnessing the destruction of Dresden, being a Prisoner of War, and PTSD, impacted Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut incorporates the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five to display Billy Pilgrim's coping mechanism

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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.

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For example, he never knew if he would be suffering in the POW camp in Germany, performing an eye examine on a child who recently lost his father in the war, or going on his honeymoon with his wife. By using those examples in the book, it made Billy seem like he really had no control of his time periods and was actually “unstuck in

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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.

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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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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 is said to become unstuck in time to different events in his life. He flashes to memories of Dresden, which is the war that he participated in. He also has episodes of his flight crash, he knows how he will die, and how his wife dies. This book is so sporadic, the audience never truly knows when this book is taking place in Billy’s life. Each page could contain three or more different events in Billy’s

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“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” As the renowned scientist Albert Einstein stated, the lack of free will can be highly detrimental to society. This principle is also emphasized in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, in which the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is involved in a plane crash. This accident further unsettles his mental condition, in addition to his experiences in World War II. This causes Billy to imagine about an alien planet called Tralfamadore, where they believe that all incidents in time are structured and that free will has no impact on the future.

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Chaos. Confusion. Repression. Throughout the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader questions the recollection of Billy Pilgrim’s, the main character, life and the insanity that ensues. A man who calls himself “unstuck in time,” Billy Pilgrim brings up his traumatic experiences to his supernatural encounters with aliens.

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Throughout the novel, Billy has specific experiences with horrific warfare

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Furthermore, World War II has not only damaged him physically, but also mentally and has gone straight to his head. For the first time in the novel, Billy Pilgrim remembers a past event rather than time-travelling to it. Time-travel, it seems, would have made the event too immediate, too painful (Harris, Charles

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Kurt Vonnegut’s style of diction is abstract and neutral throughout the novel of “Slaughterhouse Five”. The following is an example of this: “I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best friend, Allison Mitchell. They had never been off Cape Cod before. When we saw a river, we had to stop so they could stand by it and think about it for a while. They had never seen water in that long and narrow, unsalted form before.

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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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