The Trauma In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Have you ever heard that you should not always believe everything you are told? According to many researchers this is thought to be true about one of the most famous novels written by Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. Many researchers have said that not everything within this novel can be thought to be true because of the trauma that Vonnegut and his war partners had experienced with being some of the prisoners of war. When this book was written people did not know quite what trauma was all about, they did not know that trauma has affects to a person’s mental or emotional state. “Kurt Vonnegut struggled for years to depict his memories of Dresden's infamous firebombing in 1945, due in part to the fact that no specific medical discourse yet

The events that happen to these characters are supposed to be what had actually happened to some of the people within the war but because of Vonnegut’s post-traumatic stress disorder he overexaggerates events or talks about them differently in more than one way. “In a 1973 interview with Playboy, he stated that “there was a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place” (Standish 94). He noted that his “old war buddies” didn’t remember either.” (Jeremy C. Justus). The person from Playboy who had interviewed Vonnegut about the war found that some of the events Vonnegut is talking about may not be true or they may not have happened the way Vonnegut portrays them to happen. The quote that was shown earlier shows that Vonnegut does not remember everything about the war and neither does the people Vonnegut asked to help him write this novel. Vonnegut within the novel has a conversation with his old war buddy and says “I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby, the irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he’s given a regular trial, and then he’s shot by a firing squad” (Kurt Vonnegut 6). Vonnegut’s old war buddy does not remember this, and he tells Vonnegut that he does not, so this event may have happened the way that Vonnegut described, or it may have been a false memory because of his PTSD. Due to the fact that nobody who was really in the war actually remembers where the bombing actually happened this gives us a reason to not really believe what Vonnegut has to say about the war. Vonnegut also states “all this happened, more or less. The war parts anyway, are pretty much true” (Vonnegut 1). With this being said, even Vonnegut is telling you that not everything he