Three Main Stages In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

laughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a novel that focuses on the life of Billy Pilgrim. There are three main stages in his life that Vonnegut highlights: Before World War II, during World War II, and after World War II. Vonnegut’s main purpose with this novel was not to preach about how war is wrong, but how it impacts the lives of the soldiers who fight in them. The author uses the life of Billy Pilgrim to symbolize the effect that war has on the lives of all soldiers. Billy Pilgrim was an infantryman for the United States Army in World War II. He was very young, just out of high school, and not yet married. The most important event to ever happen to him in his life happened on two nights in February. He had been captured by Nazi

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. So that meant that every point in everyone’s lives is always happening, making the idea of death not so bad, because even though you are dead at that particular moment, you are still living in other moments. That is why Billy Pilgrim invents a world where justification can be given, where life and death are meaningless and feelings of guilt disappear. The only way Billy Pilgrim can confront this guilt is to excuse his survival and trivialize the gift of life and cruelty of death (‘The Horror’). He creates a new world where he can be free from his guilt. The Traflamadorians provided Billy Pilgrim with the escape he needed from his