Billy Pilgrim In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Billy Pilgrim is the main character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five. Billy is a scrawny, thin, and cowardly man that is thrown into the center of the war, more specifically the Battle of the Bulge, with little to no preparation. His character is unlike the ones you would normally see from people in the war. While being cowardly in the war, Billy is unafraid of many things afterward, the most prominent of these things being death. Billy doesn’t have much of a place to go, as he is fully accepting of fate. He accepts fate as it comes to him and doesn’t even try to change it. Since he can time travel to different moments of his life, he knows the way he dies from a very early point. He doesn’t see a point in fearing it when he knows

He goes through challenges such as his wife dying after he was in a severe plane crash, and also his daughter thinking him insane for writing to the newspaper about the Tralfamadorians, but he continues on his path and grows in popularity, until he is assassinated, which he knew was going to happen before it did. “At the time of his death, he says, he is in Chicago to address a large crowd on the subject of flying saucers and the true nature of time.” He had lived this through many times, therefore he was unafraid to face it. The real reason he lets fate take him wherever it likes is because he suffers from PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He is numb to feeling the normal fear of death, because all that he’s gone through in the past has put him so close to death that he feels he has already died. The Tralfamadorians are also part of his PTSD. They are sort of hallucinations that come from the terrible and pointless massacre that Billy had seen in his life. They are used as a coping mechanism for Billy Pilgrim, in his quest to find meaningfulness in