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Examples Of Ptsd In Slaughterhouse Five

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The book Slaughterhouse-Five takes readers on a journey throughout the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim’s, life. Billy Pilgrim is a prisoner of war, who is constantly reliving every event he has ever encountered in his life. In the beginning of the book, it is mentioned that Billy Pilgrim has a case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Because of this, Billy is constantly reliving different moments in his life, or in other words, time travelling. I believe that Billy’s PTSD is the reason he is time traveling because PTSD is an example of time traveling and reliving experiences. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, otherwise known as PTSD, is what people get when they are constantly stressing about an unfortunate event that has happened to them. PTSD …show more content…

Each story he told always had some kind of bitterness to it and things were rarely ever sweet. However, there is some kind of reason behind this. It is known that Billy has retold his story, or revisited his life a good amount of times. He has done this after the war, and the war never has a positive impact on people. With that being said, the reason that Billy’s life story is so negative is due to the cruelty of the war. In this article, it shows us how the war really has affected Billy and how it impacts his behavior. “All of this brings the reader to the understanding that Billy Pilgrim has been morphed by what he has seen thus far of hatred, and of humanity’s injustices to humanity during times of war” (“Slaughterhouse-Five: Billy Pilgrim and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”). This shows us that the effect of the war can really morph someone into a certain way, whether it’s good or bad. Billy’s new self after the war could have led him to time travel to either good parts of the war, or the bad. An example of this is when Billy time traveled back to when he was a baby and his mom had just given him a bath. He was getting powdered and his mom was playing with him and his little belly.
And Billy zoomed back in time to his infancy. He was a baby who had just been bathed by his mother. Now his mother wrapped him in a towel, carried him into a rosie room filled with sunshine. She unwrapped him, laid him on the tickling towel, powdered him between his legs, joked with him, patted his little jelly belly. Her palm on his little jelly belly made potching sounds. Billy gurgled and cooed (Vonnegut

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