Tralfamadore Essays

The Function of the Narrator in Slaughterhouse 5 A narrator is an essential element in every narrative, taking on the responsibility of telling the story. This central role is in the control the narrator has over the story, in terms of perspective and pace, as well as the sequence in which events are related to the reader. In the limitations imposed by the view presented to the reader, the narrator is able to address the issues and concerns of the novel. In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, the narrator

Elysium is a cautionary tale of a society divided by socio- economic discrimination which evolves into a plutocracy. This is a direct result of the wealthy members of society controlling all the resources of Earth (including human resources) , but is only brought to the current state of society depicted in the film by the silence of the empowered members of that society staying silent in the face of injustice. The establishing shot of the film is a bird’s eye view, which pans up to show the wasteland

Billy’s use of Tralfamadore and the Tralfamadorians as a Coping Mechanism. The portrayal of war as heroic or glamorous leaves the true nature of war untold. In Slaughterhouse Five the novel follows Billy Pilgrim, who is a World War II veteran that experienced the bombing of Dresden. Forever traumatized, Billy suffers from flashbacks and false memories of aliens and their alien planet, Tralfamadore. Billy uses the planet and people of Tralfamadore to cope with the trauma he has experienced, their

Bulge. Like Billy Pilgrim, he too was taken to Dresden as a prisoner of war. Vonnegut himself witnessed the destruction caused by the Dresden bombing and thus utilizes Billy Pilgrim to share his message on war and life. Billy’s experience with the Tralfamadore aliens and his episodes with time is only a fragment of his wild imagination. A common trait that war veterans unfortunately develop is Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD.) It is a mental disorder that is developed due to a traumatic event

other ways he healed were through time travel, and traveling to Tralfamadore. These three healing experiences cause for a very unusual war healing for Billy. Throughout the entire book, Billy is always talking about the Tralfamadorians. It is also not clear if it is a dream, real, or just his imagination. This shows that he uses the aliens as something to heal from the war. An example would be how everything that happens in Tralfamadore relates to things that actually

with the trauma; however, some of them are not always beneficial, such as Billy’s methods of creating the memory thathe is abducted by Tralfamadorians. “Tralfamadore is a fantasy, a desperate attempt to rationalize chaos, but one must sympathize with Billy’s need to create Tralfamadore” (Merrill and Scholl 6). Billy needs to create Tralfamadore to mask the trauma, but as he invites other accommodations to his fantasy planet, such as Montana Wildhack, the masking of his trauma turns into coping of

about life and death along the way. Throughout Billy’s time jumping, he has been in many settings which have affected his character development and his view on the theme of the inevitability of death. However his experiences in the POW camps and Tralfamadore have changed Billy’s outlook on life and they have made him totally desensitized from reality, making him seem crazy. Throughout

moments he traveled to in his life. These descriptions and experiences often include his interactions with the fictional planet Tralfamadore, and the bombing of Dresden. In the novel, Billy states multiple times that he wishes he could die because he is unable to connect with anyone on Earth. Result of the lack of communication Billy has with the world, he uses Tralfamadore to escape the horrors of war and uses it as

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, Billy travels in between two different planets,Earth and Tralfamadore. The question here is,why? Billy becomes “unstuck” in time as a delusion of his mental impediment, Schizophrenia.Vonnegut allows the reader to draw this consensus of,”mental wounds are far more severe than physical infliction” by using various literary devices such as flashbacks,parallel structure and syntax. Schizophrenia is a “long term mental disorder of a type involving breakdowns in the

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? Sane: having a healthy mind, able to think normally. War can mess with a person’s head; Billy has been in extreme situations, his actions don’t make him any less sane. Billy Pilgrim didn’t miss any time while he lived on the planet Tralfamadore. Using time warp Billy was

Tralfamadorians, he inherits some of their philosophies. Billy explains his newly found beliefs, “the most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die… Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘so it goes’” (Vonnegut 13). While Billy is with the Tralfamadores, he learns to view death as just another moment throughout a person’s life. In The Meaninglessness of Coming Unstuck in Time

alter the way they perceive time in this book. The book is constantly jumping around to different years and events which can make it hard for readers to follow along. Along with writing Billy Pilgrim's life out of order, he also incorporates the Tralfamadore aliens point of view which adds to how he changes the concept of reality. This not only alters how readers view time, but also reality since aliens don’t

emphasised in each dimension by contrast in its comic and tragic elements. The historical seriousness of the battle of the bulge and bombing of Dresden are contrasted by many ironies and dark humour; the fantastical, science-fiction-type place of Tralfamadore is, in truth, an outlet for Vonnegut to show his incredibly serious fatalistic views. The surprising variations of the seriousness and light-heatedness allow Vonnegut to show effectively that war is absurd. The most important historical plot strand

the past, the present, and the future." (60) In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim's insanity played a huge role in the story. Billy was drafted into World War II, and because of the experiences he had, he created a false reality that he called Tralfamadore. He adopted the Tralfamadorians' philosophies and applied them to every aspect of his life. In order to truly understand the significance of Billy Pilgrim's delusion to Slaughterhouse-Five, one must examine it's cause, the delusion itself, and

experiences in war, he uses the materialistic world of Tralfamadore as an escape from his memories of World War II. On Tralfamadore, he lives in a house carpeted “in federal gold” (Vonnegut 143). Additionally, Billy experiences pleasure in the form of Montana Wildhack, a pornographic star with whom he sires a child. Yet, he cannot fully escape the ever present violence that is ingratiated in human society; on the wall of his comfortable house in Tralfamadore, “there was a picture of a cowboy killing [another

planet called Tralfamadore, where they believe that all incidents in time are structured and that free will has no impact on the future. They also claim that damaging events such as war cannot be prevented. Through the use of diction and irony, Vonnegut reveals that one must utilize free will in order to overcome the destructive inclinations of humankind. One element of literature that Vonnegut uses to emphasize his theme regarding free will is diction. When Billy is on Tralfamadore, he asks how

Billy’s Coping Mechanisms Billy Pilgrim, the main character of Slaughterhouse Five, was a survivor of the destruction in Dresden during World War II and a Prisoner of War. As a result of the effects of having been a Prisoner of War, and having been a witness to the full immensity of destruction, it can be inferred that Billy Pilgrim suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder throughout the novel, which caused him to examine the events of war over and over throughout the course of his life. In

time in Germany, Billy becomes “unstuck in time.” Essentially, Billy jumps from one moment in his life to another without control. To explain the story, it must be broken down into three main parts: Billy’s time in war, Billy’s time on the planet Tralfamadore, and Billy’s life after the war. The main focus of the story is Billy’s experiences in Germany. Billy, an eighteen year old boy, is a chaplain’s assistant. A chaplain’s

According to Maria Semple, a contemporary American novelist and screenwriter, “There 's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.” As Semple explains with this quote, novels often times utilize unreliable narrators as a means of pressing forth thematic depth while grasping at an interaction between the audience and the author. Both Kurt Vonnegut and Sherman Alexie utilize unreliable narrators in this exact fashion with their novels “Slaughterhouse-Five”

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Although this topic is quite serious in some situations, Billy Pilgrim doesn't seem to know he has this disorder and his thoughts and actions are comical at times. The idea of traveling to a distant planet named Tralfamadore is very unlikely and its most reasonable to say Billy made it up. Towards the ending of the novel, Billy releases the information about his trip to the “book store” and his knowledge of the books by Kilgore Trout. The reader now notices that the