Slaughterhouse Five analysis
...telligent to say about how such an atrocity like the bombing of Dresden could occur. Also, Vonnegut says the phrase “so it goes” following the mentioning of every death in the story. This is done to show that all deaths are equal, especially in times of war. So many innocent people die in war that no death is more significant than any other since they are all unjust and seemingly random, and Vonnegut’s saying “so it goes” after each mention of a death shows this. The book points out that there can be no heroes in war without victims. Billy Pilgrim is a joke of a soldier yet he lives, while other trained men are the ones that die. This shows how in war no death is more significant than any others since the survivors are basically random. Vonnegut also pointed out that in war there can be no heroes without thousands of deaths. This shows that the most glorified part of war must be accompanied with a horrible fact, showing how pointless war is. Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut makes a strong effort to show just how awful war was and how there is no purpose for the atrocities that occur. Vonnegut didn’t only show how bad lives were for soldiers during the war, but more the serious aftereffects of war on the survivors. He wanted to show war leaves mental scars on everyone involved because of the atrocities that occur there, and he uses the post-war life of Billy Pilgrim to show this. All of the events and deaths Billy witnesses have a severe effect on him when he tries to life a normal life. Throughout the entire story Billy can’t overcome the tragedies he witnesses in war and live a sane life. Billy breaks down mentally as he constantly suffers from delusions caused by his war trauma. The horrific destruction that Billy has witnessed constantly occupies his mind over the years and he is not able to overcome it. Throughout his post-war life various things such as songs trigger his mind to thing of the atrocities he witnessed in the war. The traumatic effect the war has on Billy completely disrupts his post-war life. He is unable to enjoy it and can not seem to find meaning or purpose to his life. Billy distances himself from his family as he is unable to communicate and relate to them, because he has so many mental problems. He barely knew his son and wasn’t able to ever talk to him when he attempted to. On the surface, he is a very successful man. He is a wealthy optometrist who is married with two children, but he never really gets to know his family, and is too war torn to understand his success and enjoy it as he can’t forget the atrocities he experienced in the past. Billy is mentally unstable, has a shaky grip on reality, and has an extremely overactive imagination. He has powerful flashbacks to earlier moments in his life and while Billy is actually dreaming these things, he believes he is traveling back in time and experiencing these events once again. Vonnegut uses Billy’s flashbacks as a way to show his mental instability, as he travels to other moments in his life rather than face reality. Billy suffers from delusions, but these delusions allow him to function and accept his life. Billy also suffers from a sleeping disorder and spontaneously begins to cry for no real reason. He finds life completely meaningless and is unable to enjoy his post-war life. In order to deal with his mind and life being in such disarray, he creates the story of being abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore and the ideas and “truths of the world” they shared with him. He is traumatized from the war and can’t come to terms with the destruction he witnessed, so he uses a far-fetched theory to create a world he can understand. The people of Tralfamadore perceived time as an assemblage of moments existing simultaneously. They believe in a concept of non linear time, where all moments reoccur endlessly and simultaneously. They accept death as it comes and perceive deaths as another moment with no more significance than any other moment in life. Although someone is dead at that moment the Traflamadorians believe that person is alive in another moment somewhere else. They accept their fate and believe that they are powerless to change it. They don’t believe in free will and think that their life is already set out for them. The Tralfamadore ideas on life are summed up well when Billy dreams of first being taken there; “I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings for explanations. It simply is. Take moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” Billy embraces these ideas as it helps him cope with the death of so many innocent people in Dresden he witnessed as it gives him some sort of explanation for it. Vonnegut used Tralfamadore, which was just a figment of Billy’s mind that he created to cope with and comfort him after the meaningless slaughter he witnessed, as the main way to show how greatly war had disrupted Billy’s life. After the war, Billy failed to deal with the events he witnessed because his mind was in such disarray, and he used Tralfamadore to escape a world destroyed by war that he could not understand. Tralfamadore teaches to accept things as they come, which comforts Billy after the tragic events he witnessed in war. He is unable to live his life normally following the war, so he salvages his sanity by inventing a new understanding of time and life through Tralfamadore. Although Billy is insane, he is at peace, which is all he wants. Billy is unable find a way to cope with the deaths and destruction he witnessed, so he creates Tralfmadore and their ideas in order to deal with it. Although Billy believes that Tralfamadore and the events that occur are real, there is substantial evidence throu...