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Traumatic Experiences In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

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Throughout Slaughterhouse five by Kurt Vonnegut Billy Pilgrim claims to have been “unstuck” in time. It is apparent that Billy is mentally unstable due to surviving being a prisoner of war, the destruction of Dresden during World War ll, and being forced to clean away debris from the destruction. Billy Pilgrim is often reliving different parts of his life, especially the parts that were most traumatic for him. It can be concluded that Billy Pilgrim did not time travel throughout his life, instead he experienced flashbacks caused by the post traumatic stress he endured from the war. At war many young men are sent to fight. These innocent men are exposed to violence and death all through the war. The bloody and traumatic experiences from war are …show more content…

On the day of his daughter's wedding, Billy had been watching movies about American bombers in World War two, the war that Billy had fought in. This may have been what triggered him to remember the specific points in his life. After the movie Billy had been waiting around, knowing he was about to be kidnapped by Tralfamadorians. This shows that Billy had lived through this previously, making it a memory he has remembered and it is all just a flashback in his mind. This was one of the many times the tralfamadorians had taken him. Billy was confused about what had just happened to him, “Billy licked his lips, thought a while, at last; ‘Why me?’’. The tralfamadorians responded to billy, “‘Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.’”(Vonnegut 77). This was a stressful and frightening event for Billy, he had no answer to why he was being taken. He is then “dislodged” in time, sending him back to war after he had fallen asleep on the flying saucer. While having a flashback, it is common that your surroundings will begin to get blurry. It could’ve have been that Billy did not fall asleep on the flying saucer, but he was

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Billy Pilgrim is a character that suffers from many mental illnesses, one being PTSD. He primarily gets this from being in the War. It was said “A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting the Third World War at any time.” (page 57)

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A majority of Trout’s novels resemble the experiences of Billy Pilgrim, especially The Mysterious zoo novel and The Big Board. The plot in these novels directly relate to Billy’s experience with the Tralfamadores and Montana Wildhack. Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension by Kilgore Trout describe the basis of the fourth dimension that is later explained to Billy by the Tralfamadores. The similarity between Trout’s novels and Billy’s “unstuck in time” experience definitely mirror each other and are able to conclude that Billy did not physically travel to

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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.

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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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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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