...Vonnegut also aims to express the internal destruction that war causes among individuals who live through it. The nonlinear, extremely unpredictable layout of the novel directly correlates to the internal chaos Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, feels after the war. Billy skips back and forth in time. Events happening in his current life seem to trigger flashbacks of terrors he experienced during the war. He is so shell shocked, so mentally distressed by the horrific war he has experienced that he is “unstuck from time” and unable to ground himself in reality. He even convinces himself that he is abducted by friendly, peaceful aliens called Tralfamadorians who live in a fourth dimension where all time exists eternally and simultaneously. He reports that they explain to him that because of this fourth dimension, there is no free will. With this knowledge the aliens become an outlet through which Billy dispels the...
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...Thus Far in Slaughterhouse Five, the readers were bombarded with many different pieces of new information. Billy Pilgrim was aboard with the creatures of Tralfamadore heading to their home. On the way, Billy asked to read a book to kill the time. Although they had many books on microfilm, they could not project them so he was stuck with one option, and the book was called Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann. They did not only have books in english, but they had books written in their form of writing. On page 88 it says, ““Only Tralfamadorian novels, which I’m afraid you couldn’t begin to understand,” said the speaker on the wall.” Even though Billy obviously couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, he tried to and he discovered that they are laid out so there were clumps of symbols separated by stars which were bits of messages so if you read them all, they would have...
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...Slaughterhouse-Five - Imagery Kurt Vonnegut's uses many images to enhance the overall effect of Slaughterhouse- Five. Throughout the novel, in both war scenes and in the protagonist's travels back and forward in time, the many images produce a believable story of the unusual life of Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut uses color imagery, repetitive images, and images of pain and suffering to develop the novel and create situations that the reader can accept and comprehend. Billy Pilgrim's life is far from normal. Throughout most of his adult life he has been moving backwards and forwards through time, from one event to another, in a non-sequential order. At least, this schizophrenic life is hard to understand. Because Vonnegut wants the reader to relate to Billy Pilgrim, he uses distinct images to tell the story. One type of imagery in Slaughterhouse-Five is color imagery. While Billy is in the war, Vonnegut describes several pairs of "blue and ivory" feet. Billy's own hands and feet are blue and ivory, as are those of the corpses he glimpses during his march as prisoner of war (Vonnegut 65). These colors represent those that are cold, dead, or dying. At another point in the novel, Billy describes his first time traveling experience.He began to "swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light . . . going backwards into pre-birth, which was red light and bubbling sounds" (43). The careful and vivid depiction of colors enables the...
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...represented. Ultimately, this suggests that Slaughterhouse Five’s larger theme at work is that the violence of war is a trauma that is utterly unrepresentable. In majority of Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim’s explanations are done in a matter-of-fact way. Whether this be about time travel, his family’s tragedies, or about the...
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...relationships with everyone around you. In the novel, Slaughterhouse Five, the reader is taken on an adventure with Billy Pilgrim through being a prisoner of war, traveling through time, and being kidnapped to a foreign planet in order to become a zoo exhibit. Through Billy’s life, he is constantly being flashed through different periods in his life, all while lacking any emotion at all.After reading the book, one can easily assume Slaughterhouse Five is a book about how life should be lived, as it is shown through Billy’s characteristics and the repetitive use of time travel....
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...Slaughter-House Five In the semi autobiographical novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut uses the character Billy Pilgrim to depict the effects of war, death, and post traumatic stress disorder. Kurt Vonnegut felt the need to create the character of Billy Pilgrim to express his own feelings of trauma because of the difficulty to address them on a personal level. Like Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim was captured by the Germans, and witnessed the fire bombing in Dresden on February 13, 1945, which is known to be the most detrimental airstrike in military history, killing an estimated 135,000 people. “He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked...A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what is was like outside, then he would come back down and whisper to the other guards. There was fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame are everything organic, everything that would burn.” (Vonnegut 177) This quote from the book illustrates how the image of Dresden is instilled in Vonnegut's brain, from when he witnessed it, and how he can't let go of his lingering memories of Dresden. Billy Pilgrim is greatly disturbed by the obliteration he witnessed in Germany. These events signify Vonnegut’s painful past and he comes to terms with his pain through the writing of Slaughter-House Five. Freese explains...
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