The Effects of War on Slaughterhouse-Five’s Billy Pilgrim.

by Cameron Batschke

 

            Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a novel that focuses on the life of Billy Pilgrim.  There are three main stages in his life that Vonnegut highlights:  Before World War II, during World War II, and after World War II.  Vonnegut’s main purpose with this novel was not to preach about how war is wrong, but how it impacts the lives of the soldiers who fight in them.  The author uses the life of Billy Pilgrim to symbolize the effect that war has on the lives of all soldiers.

            Billy Pilgrim was an infantryman for the United States Army in World War II.  He was very young, just out of high school, and not yet married.  The most important event to ever happen to him in his life happened on two nights in February.  He had been captured by Nazi soldiers and had been staying under a slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany.  On the 13^th and 14^th of that month, in the year of 1945, Allied air forces bombed Dresden and killed between 135,000 to 250,000 innocent people (Vit).  Dresden was not a war city.  There was very little industrial activity.  It was a city of hospitals and prisoner of war camps.  Of the 250,000 possible that died, Billy Pilgrim was not one of them.

            Being one of the lucky people to survive the vicious attacks on Dresden put guilt into the heart of Billy Pilgrim.  He struggled for many years trying to figure out why he was one of the ones picked to live.  After the war, something strange and extraordinary happened to our protagonist, he was abducted by aliens called the Traflamadorians, who were very mentally and technologically advanced beings.  Billy spent much time discussing philosophy with them.  A particular philosophy of the Traflamadorians that Billy clung to was the idea that time was the 4^th dimension.  So that meant that every point in everyone’s lives is always happening, making the idea of death not so bad, because even though you are dead at that particular moment, you are still living in other moments.  That is why Billy Pilgrim invents a world where justification can be given, where life and death are meaningless and feelings of guilt disappear.  The only way Billy Pilgrim can confront this guilt is to excuse his survival and trivialize the gift of life and cruelty of death (‘The Horror’).  He creates a new world where he can be free from his guilt.  The Traflamadorians provided Billy Pilgrim with the escape he needed from his guilt.

            Billy was not really abducted.  The abduction was all apart of the world that he created in his own mind to deal with the torture of his guilt (Simpson).  He got the ideas of Traflamadorians and of the 4^th dimension from the books of a science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout.  Trout was an unsuccessful science-fiction novelist, but he had one true fan.  Billy Pilgrim had all of his books and read them all religiously.  He obsessed about them, he read them until a shield was built over his eyes and he believed that the words of a zany science-fiction writer’s books were true. 

            After he was ‘abducted’ by the Traflamadorians, yet another extraordinary thing started happening to him.  At random times, he became, ‘unstuck in time.’  No doubt as a result of the abduction, he would start going back in time, and to the future.  This was a strange gift given to Billy by the Traflamadorians to try and further instill the idea of the 4^th dimension to him.  There was a pattern though, in his time travel.  Whenever he would become unstuck in time, and travel to the future, he would always, directly after his time in the future was done, go back to a point in the war.  Whenever he would go to the past, before the war, he would go from there, directly to a different point in the war.  One minute he would be lying in his death bed at an old age, and the next minute he would be in the trenches fighting against the Axis Powers.  The symbolism behind the repetitive return to the war is quite obvious.  Ever since the war, Billy’s whole life had been tainted.  He could not think of a happy memory, without at some point thinking of the war.  His whole past had been ruined.  When he traveled forward in time, he still ended up going back to the war, this was showing that in the future, even in his death bed, he would not be able to escape the horrors that the war had done to him (Miska).  Since Billy survived one of the worst and more unnecessary human massacres in the history of the world, it would be nearly impossible to forget what happened.  So even after all the good things happen to Billy in his life after the war, such as becoming a successful and well respected optometrist, he still could not forget. 

            In conclusion, the major effect of the war made was that Billy Pilgrim lost his mind.  He could not handle the facts of reality, so he had to invent a whole new reality that he could deal with.  Kilgore Trout and the Traflamadorians helped make his life easier.  He used them as a tool for diminishing his guilt of survival.  His belief in the 4^th dimension of time made death not a bad thing anymore.  Death had been the driving force behind his guilt, and when he found a chance to make death seem not so bad, he took it.  The genius of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel was that it never once talked about war being wrong.  Everyone expected him to write about the evilness of war, but he did not.  He simply made the reader despise war by showing how it affects the lives of those who are in it.

 

Bibliography:

The Horror of War Exposed in Slaughterhouse-Five.’  Slaughterhouse-Five Essays.

            28 March 2005 <http://123helpme.com/view.asp?id=16476>.

Miska, Michael.  ‘War in Slaughterhouse-Five.’  Marek Vit’s Kurt Vonnegut Corner.

            28 March 2005 <http://geocities.datacellar.net/Hollywood/4953/kv_sh5_war.html>.

Simpson, Josh.  ‘Literature, Ideas, and the Invention of Reality in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions or ‘Fantasies of an Impossibly Hospitable World.’  Critique 45.3 (2004): 261-272.

            MasterFILE.  EBSCOhost Connellsville High School Library, Connellsville, PA

            28 March 2005 <epnet.com>.

Vit, Mark.  ‘The Themes of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.’ Marek Vit’s Kurt Vonnegut Corner.  28 March 2005

            <http://geocities.datacellar.net/Hollywood/4953/vonn.html>.

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.  Slaughterhouse-Five: or Children’s Crusade, a Duty Dance with Death. New York: Dell publishing, 1971.