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Who Is The Protagonist In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

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Billy Pilgrim the protagonist in the novel Slaughterhouse Five, will lead the story in a very unorthodox fashion due to the fact that he has been “unstuck in time.” He will experience many events in a non-linear format, jumping back and forth in time throughout his life. This novel never actually introduces who is narrating the events, but the author Kurt Vonnegut does chime in and share some of his input on certain events throughout the story which gives away that it is he who is sharing it. For a better understanding of the novel, this summary will be given in chronological order.
Part 1: The protagonist Billy Pilgrim is born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. He grows up to be a particularly wimpy and awkward man who for a short time studies at the Ilium school of optometry in 1944. He is then drafted into the war and with little battle training sent to Europe to partake in the Battle of Bulge. He …show more content…

This camp is located in an abandoned slaughterhouse. This slaughterhouse is the reason for the title of the novel. (Kurt Vonnegut at this time begins to hint to the audience that he actually took part in being captured and imprisoned in this slaughterhouse by expressing future events in great detail and emotion) Soon after they arrive here ( February 13, 1945), American bombers wreak havoc on the city. The attack leaves Dresden nearly completely destroyed, killing thousands of people in the process. Billy and some other prisoners are given jobs to help dig out bodies from the rubble of the city. After a couple of months, Billy is freed from the camp after the surrender of Germany in May 1945, he returns to New York to resume his optometry schooling. He then meets Valencia, the daughter of the school owner and gets engaged to her. He begins to experience a nervous breakdown and checks into a veterans hospital to recover. He eventually gets better but still finds himself crying for no

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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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SlaughterHouse Five is a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1969. It is an An anti-war novel whose main character is Billy Pilgrim. The title "Slaughterhouse-Five" holds significant meaning throughout Kurt Vonnegut's novel as it symbolizes the senseless and destructive nature. The phrase "Slaughterhouse-Five" is introduced early in the novel as the location where the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is held captive during World War II. The slaughterhouse represents the inhumanity and brutality of wars where animals are killed and dismembered without regard for their lives.

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Albeit, Billy's coping mechanism is a negative one, it worked for him. He is disassociated from reality because he truly believes the Tralfamadorian philosophy of "All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist." (27) The bombing of Dresden happened, and since it happened, it has always happened that way and always will happen that way. At least, that's what the Tralfamadorians think.

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This description of pilgrim in the war showed that he did not belong in the war as he was unprepared for it. Many prepared soldiers of the war die but somehow Billy who is unprepared survives, this part of the story helps to backup the Tralfamadorians way of thinking. The ability to act at one’s own discretion is what free will is and the author uses the background of Billy Pilgrim to prove that there is no such

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Billy relives many flashbacks to when he fought in the War, and the firebombing of Dresden. One of Billy’s flashbacks takes place during the war when Billy gets captured by the German soldiers. Billy joins a group during World War II. There he meets a man named Roland Weary and two regimental scouts. As Billy starts to lag behind the other three man, Weary begins to give Billy a hard time and informs him to keep up.

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Billy Pilgrim was an outcast due to his body type in the army which was thin with little muscle or definition in his body. Now, he is even more shunned due to his belief in a foreign group of people taking him back to their planet to put him in a zoo with a promiscuous actress. Nobody believes his story when he is speaking on its behalf. The continued transportation to Earth and Tralfamadore create a better relationship between Billy and the people of the planet. This influences the his ideology as mentioned before, but it gives him a place that is said to make him even happier than he is on Earth.

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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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He was a “funny-looking child who became a funny-looking youth-- tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola.” (Vonnegut 23) Billy attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military services for World War II. He then saw service with the Infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. After his honorable discharge from the Army in 1945, Billy again enrolled in the Ilium School of Optometry.

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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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Billy talked about these nice moments again and again, showing how he had a great appreciation for life, which was reinforced when he met the Tralfamadorians and they explained how time really passes, “If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I 'm grateful that so many of these moments are nice,” (269). When reading this book quite a few of us believed that it proved how monotonous and boring life was, when it really just de-emphasized death and made the lives of the characters much more meaningful. In fact, Slaughterhouse-Five is not Vonnegut’s only novel where his overall message can be found, which is that all life is moving towards death, so we might as well find at least okay-ness, even in the face of doom and gloom. Even though his approach may seem much too simple, it is often difficult for us as humans to think of the chronology of life instead of just the end result of death.

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The scene I selected begins on page 106, with an interaction between the English Colonel and Edgar Darby, who’s keeping a watchful eye over the morphine induced Billy Pilgrim. Darby and the aging Colonial strike up a conversation, commenting on the clean shaven Americans, when they realize that this change in appearance has sparked a major realization. Originally, they believed that the war was “being fought by aging men like [themselves]” ( ) when in reality, the ongoing “wars were fought by babies” ( ). Their beards had given soldiers a manly and battle tested appearance, obscuring their actual age, a symbol for how war alters men physically and mentally.

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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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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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He travelled through time, experiencing his life in a non linear manner, going as far as calmly undergoing his death, before being transported back in time to the rest of his life. In the author's words Billy Pilgrim wasn't a time traveller, "Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time". The idea of Pilgrim being unstuck in time was introduced early on in the second chapter, setting up the premise for the rest of the novel. The use of 'unstuck' suggests that Pilgrim has been stuck unwillingly beforehand and since he is being unstuck, he has become free. This allows Vonnegut to use time as his own tool, and ignore the the restrictions that come with following a chronological timeline found in the majority of other novels.

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