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Three Main Stages In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

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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 …show more content…

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

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531 Words | 3 Pages

no this isn’t the case. Billy is not actually experiencing reality, but instead what Billy is suffering from is a coping mechanism from the condition known as PTSD. Billy uses these jumps into different times, and places from his past to cope with his traumatic stress that he received from the war that he was drafted into. PTSD is a condition linked to events that have happened in peoples lives that aren't exactly enjoyable memories, but rather the opposite. This case becomes present in people who have gone through traumatic experiences.

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Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut intertwines reality and fiction to provide the reader with an anti-war book in a more abstract form. To achieve this abstraction, Kurt Vonnegut utilizes descriptive images, character archetypes, and various themes within the novel. By doing so, he created a unique form of literature that causes the reader to separate reality from falsehood in both their world, and in the world within Vonnegut’s mind. Vonnegut focuses a lot on the characters and their actions in “Slaughterhouse Five.”

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1187 Words | 5 Pages

Not only was the story fictitious in that Billy pilgrim was not a real character, and that he could travel through time as if he was somehow “unstuck,” but there are also aliens know as Tralfamadorians, which is arguably the most science fiction thing you can put in your book. The Tralfamadorians provide the perspective of something important: and outside observer. Tralfamadorians, whom will from here on out be referred to as Tralfs, are special as they can see all of time at once. They view time as not a movement through space based on one’s own decisions one after another, but as a series of predetermined moments that occur in order, and cannot be altered. The Tralf point of view is that there is no

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Title: Slaughterhouse-Five Author: Kurt Vonnegut Thesis: Throughout KVs SF, he describes in matter of fact way the psychological impact/effects of the devastation of war and death upon Billy Pilgrim and how he handles it. Through the exploration of Billy Pilgrim’s detached and indifferent thoughts, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five illustrates the coping mechanisms of a World War II veteran with post traumatic stress disorder.

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It brings the reader's into a world of war and death and makes it normal; Many people see death as a bad thing, if they read this book they would be able to see how uncontrollable it is. Vonnegut writes billy as a very quiet, shy person who experiences about as much death as he had in his lifetime. Death and war are both things that no one can control, death happens to everyone one way or another and it’s how you see death that determines how you react to it. In the war Vonnegut and Billy both experience tremendous amounts of lose in such a little amount of time and when you experience that you are no longer in a state of mind where you feel as though death is unnatural and a horrible thing. they simply know what they can’t control and say this “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.”

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1745 Words | 7 Pages

Dresden was one of the world’s most beautiful cities full of life and culture up until the Dresden bombing that destroyed innocent civilian lives and burned the historic town of Dresden to ashes during World War II. The bombings, resulting from the ongoing war is named the worst civilian casualty bombings and the most questioned. The bombs dropped by the Allies were unexplained because the bombs were not aimed at any war material headquarters or at a base of any Axis powers. The Dresden bombings were a catastrophic unnecessary point of attack. In Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five, the Dresden bombings are discussed as well as highly influencing to the book as a whole.

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History does not always convey the absolute truth. It offers only one side of the story. The strong and powerful voices always drown out the sounds of the weak and beaten. The winner’s word will always be taken over the loser’s. The content that lies within the textbooks was not written by the defeated.

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Billy eventually accepts the views of the Tralfamadorians as the lack of free will is prevalent is his life. He is drafted against his will to participate in a war he has no drive to fight in. He has a notable lack of training, is innapropriately dressed as Cinderella, is generally indifferent about his survival, and yet manages to live while those around him

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1366 Words | 6 Pages

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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1162 Words | 5 Pages

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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677 Words | 3 Pages

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim spends most of his time traveling from present to past, and back and forth. Everyone who met Billy assumed he’d lost his mind or was simply speaking nonsense. However, according to Billy’s story as told by the narrator, there is evidence that suggests there’s a possibility Billy did in fact time travel; Billy’s reaction to the barbershop quartet’s singing during his eighteenth wedding anniversary in 1964, the presence of a framed quote in Billy’s office, and the return of the picture of the woman and the pony. These are instances in which time has repeated itself in a peculiar way that gives rise to the likelihood of Billy’s adventures being true.

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1282 Words | 6 Pages

Throughout the novel, Billy has specific experiences with horrific warfare

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641 Words | 3 Pages

Vonnegut writes, “Billy says that he first came unstuck in time in 1944, long before the trip to Trafalmadore” (Vonnegut 30). This is a significant event in the novel as it describes Billy Pilgrim’s first encounter with the distortion of

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1189 Words | 5 Pages

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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1076 Words | 5 Pages

Storytelling has been the epitome of human expression for thousands of years. Along with musicians and artists, talented storytellers use their work to share ideas with others, often in an effort to evoke emotion or to persuade people to think similarly. Every element in a story is carefully crafted by the author in order to communicate a desired message to his or her audience. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut incorporates irony into the story to express his belief that fighting wars is illogical.

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