In the book, Slaughter House Five, Billy Pilgrim is referred to as being “unstuck in time” but really he is just suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One of the big reasons that we know Billy is suffering from PTSD is because he is constantly having nightmares. While he is traveling in the boxcar to the POW camp in Germany, none of the other prisoners want to fall asleep next to him because he would kick and cry in his sleep. Also, when Billy hears sirens outside in Chapter 3, he jumps and get flustered because he believes in his mind that World War III was being started which is a symptom of PTSD. When suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, victims relate sounds and feelings to what they heard and felt while they were suffering through their …show more content…
Billy experienced how he spent time in the hospital in the POW camp in Germany and talked about what he saw and felt while he was there. When suffering from PTSD, victims replay their exact experiences in their head over and over again because it is too hard to push the memory aside and forget. People may see Billy reliving his life experiences as being”unstuck in time” when really he isn’t experiencing those actions right then and there, he is having flashbacks of what he suffered through in the war. Being "unstuck in time” would be a good way to describe Billy Pilgrim if he hadn’t gone through the terrifying experiences in the war. In the book, Billy is described as never knowing what part of his life he was going to live next. 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
Billy Pilgrim was an ex-soldier who had experienced very harsh events which caused him to get stuck in time and revisit them. Revisiting time can cause one to ignore and find the mishaps and the happiness of life meaningless. Tralfamadorians’s ideas of this phrase was that even though one can die, events in that person’s life can be visited many times only through the invention of time travel. Being unstuck in time, Billy can visit the many events in his life including his death. Due to being unstuck in time makes Billy careless about the importance of life, death, and time.
Does Billy Pilgrim suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? In the novel, Slaughterhouse Five, the author Kurt Vonnegut is centered on events which took place in the 1940s during World War II; at this time it is very much a story during the Vietnam era. The novel faced the horrors of war, especially the bombing of Dresden. Billy Pilgrim, the main character, having survived through being a prisoner of war and the destruction of Dresden, suffered through traumatic events.
Kunze wrote; “Even after the war, Billy is unable to enact an acceptable example of American masculinity. His very name suggests his childlike state: “Billy” as the diminutive of “William,” while “Pilgrim” alludes to his disconnectedness from the world that leads him to travel between time and place. Believing himself to be an abductee, Billy frustrates his family, who perceives what today may be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as insanity. His daughter infantilizes him, sternly advising him, “If you’re going to act like a child, maybe we’ll just have to treat you like a child” (167)…” (Kunze 2012).
Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut described the traumas that Billy Pilgrim experienced as a prisoner of war during World War II. He witnessed the death of many of his comrades and the devastating destruction of Dresden, which resulted in post traumatic stress disorder. The numerous atrocities that Billy faced showed that both the Allies and the Axis used cruel, inhumane tactics in an attempt to win, which made the victory of the Allied forces seem hollow. In my collage, I refer to the celebrations of “victory” during World War II and contrast them with the widespread destruction and suffering caused by the war. My collage emphasizes that there is no true victor of war when each side uses unethical means that result in the suffering
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
Billy survived the bombing of Dresden, Germany. “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” Slaughterhouse-five (22). The flying saucers take him to the planet Tralfamadore on his daughter’s wedding night, for their zoo. Billy Pilgrims’s timeline is a ‘wibbly wobbly’ mess of events, for reasons like that, many question his sanity. But what makes a person sane?
One of the longest chapters in Slaughterhouse-Five is the fifth chapter; it contains more than thirteen time travels. In the previous chapters Billy has traveled back and forth through the 1940’s to his childhood experiences with his father in Grand Canyon, then Billy took a very short trip through time and found himself back in the war and his life after the war. In this chapter the reader sees Billy for the first time in his childhood, through a flashback. Somehow Vonnegut is still able to incorporate death on Billy’s family trip, which brings forth the “so it goes” once again.
Now before I continue have you ever heard of PTSD? It is a disorder you can develop in which you have difficulties processing and recovering from terrifying events. This disease is most commonly found in veterans. Back to Billy, he is now in a situation that any person would be terrified, not to mention he is a loser kid who just lost his dad. While Billy is dying in the woods he closes his eyes and “time travels” for the first time.
For Billy Pilgrim, his trips through time are a source of never-ending anxiety, described as causing him to live “in a constant state of fright…because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” There are examples of Sinai experiencing similar feelings of fear and unease when he connects the dots Time has laid out for him, such as his remarks in the chapter ‘The perforated sheet’ (“…and there will be another bald foreigner…and pie-dogs aren’t far away…Enough. I’m frightening myself.”). Diverting from the mystical basis of Saleem’s experiences, Billy has become “unstuck” in time due to his supposed abduction at the hands of an alien species called “the Tralfamadorians”, who hold peculiar ideas on Time of their own. During his stay on Tralfamadore, Billy begins to get a sense of their abstract attitude towards life and death.
Billy, in his typical disoriented mode of detachment, doesn’t answer the doctor, but instead pulls from the seam of the tiny overcoat a large diamond and a partial denture he had found lodged there to show the German. Furthermore Billy is not portrayed as a courageous and brave hero of the war but on the contrary he becomes a synonym of weakness, laughter and an incapable soldier not even in control of his own fate however beside all this negative attributes Billy manages to survive where a lot of his war companions don’t, he manages to make it through one of the worst atrocities of the war, the Dresden firebombing, Billy even manages to survive a plane crash on top of Sugarbush Mountain, in Vermont after the war where lot of people died
(Vonnegut 178) Billy gets hit with a wave of PTSD after seeing a barbershop quartet perform because it reminds him of the four German soldiers that captured him during the war. Another instance of his PTSD is when Billy flashes back to when he was receiving a standing ovation from the Lion’s Club.
Another symptom of PTSD involves reliving flashbacks relating to traumatic events. Billy having flashbacks shows that he suffers from PTSD because he relives moments in the war that caused him traumatic stress. The firebombing of Dresden caused Billy to have PTSD because he was one of the only people to survive it. Billy’s ultimate sign of PTSD starts he thinks he gets abducted by
Let’s start with the main character himself, Billy. Billy is an odd soul that is dealing with things out of this world. Dealing with his PTSD is a big themes in the book. He says he keeps getting “unstuck in time” from the PTSD. Then again at any moment he can be transferred to a different time in his life.
He had fond memories of ska concerts, long road trips, and crazy parties. Life wasn’t like that anymore. The worst part was, he had put himself in this position to support his girlfriend (now wife) and her daughter. Billy didn’t regret this decision, he just couldn’t understand why he had abandoned his previous vagabond lifestyle for a more constricted one. I guess you could call it growing up
He startles easily: when he hears a siren going off in Chapter 3, Section 6, he jumps and worries that World War III is coming: “A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War Three at any time”(Kurt Vonnegut 57). One of the most distinguished symptoms of PTSD was the reliving of frightful past experiences that become literal in Billy's eyes as he travels back and forth in time. And according to Kevin Brown in his journal article, The Psychiatrists Were Right: Anomic Alienation in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five, “Vonnegut tell