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Psychological criticism of kurt vonnegut
Psychological criticism of kurt vonnegut
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Powerful Emotion (3)
Anyone who reads The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe instantly feels the emotional intensity portrayed by Werther, the protagonist. His speculations about life are indeed unique, especially in modern times when life often goes by quickly without notice. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why his immense emotion strikes a chord with readers as coming from someone crazy or dangerous. Werther’s mental state seems incredibly alive at some times while seemingly lifeless at others. This lifeless state of mind is similar to another sorrowful character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. In his story of Billy Pilgrim, a similar wonder engulfs the reader, causing us to question the cause of both his mindset and of our own. These books bring a couple of interesting questions to mind… How much emotion is too much? How little is too little? These characters struggle with powerful emotion in many ways, and are therefore judged as mad. The two protagonists engage in totally different journeys, but each of them leads the reader to discover the limits of human emotion. These limits are reached by Werther and Billy, therefore leading to both characters’ demise.
In simple terms, I think that Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five demonstrates the extremity of too little emotion, in contrast with Werther in The Sorrows of Young Werther demonstrating the extremity of too much emotion. Both of these characters live their lives in suffering because of this lack/surfeit of emotion. I’d like to start my analysis off with the odd style of Kurt Vonnegut and how he portrays his main character.
Billy Pilgrim has mental problems. Too many to name, in fact. He has difficulty in almost every aspect of life because of these mental problems. Vonnegut has concocted an anti-war novel that blames Billy’s health (or lack thereof) on the trauma of being in a war, but poor Billy has many problems even before the war. He seems to be extremely emotionally detached from all aspects of life. Yes, he gets married and has children, but it seems to be portrayed as somewhat sarcastic and unimportant. This is the danger of being unemotional in life.
One of the strongest points proving Billy’s lack of emotion is when he is at war and essentially tries to set himself up for his enemy to shoot him (Vonnegut 29). The incident seems very ironic considering Vonnegut’s anti-war opinions, because he seems to want Billy to honor the fairness of war.
The human mind is a part of the body which current science knows little about. Trigger mechanisms, and other factors within the brain are relatively unknown to current humanity. Therefore, in order to produce a diagnostic on why Billy Pilgrim became “unstuck” in time, the reader of Slaughterhouse Five must come to terms with situations concerning the experiences described in the novel. Billy Pilgrim starts out, chronologically, as a fairly basic infantryman in the United States Army during the last Nazi offensive of the war, also known as the Battle of the Bulge (Vonnegut, 32). That battle resulted in fierce fighting, and also in massacres (such as the one that occurred near Malmedy, France), and the reader may be sure that there were men who became mentally unsound due to the effects of what they experienced there. Pilgrim is taken in by a group of soldiers who have found themselves behind the Nazi lines and are required to travel, by foot, back to friendly lines (Vonnegut, 32).
has to face is post-traumatic stress disorder. Post-traumatic stress disorder is “an anxiety disorder that can occur after someone experiences a traumatic event that caused intense fear, helplessness, or horror. PTSD can result from personally experienced traumas (e.g., rape, war, natural disasters, abuse, serious accidents, and captivity) or from the witnessing or learning of a violent or tragic event.” Otherwise meaning something happened in your past keeps triggering and haunting you in present day and experiences that could put you into a mental shock. Even though Billy Pilgrim is no longer involved with the war, he still is involved with the war. (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Billy Pilgrim had to face many different types of traumatic events. In the Slaughterhouse-Five the book mention Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension by Kilgore Trout stated “It was about people whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them (Slaughterhouse-Five 104).” Saying that the Earth doctors wouldn’t know what they were dealing with. If someone would tell they would think the person who did was bizarre. But Billy Pilgrim didn’t realize that he read the book before when he was at a veteran hospital. When Billy Pilgrim was a prisoner of war he remembers that
Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain’s assistant. A chaplain in the war’s job is to minister to military personnel, and families working for the military.. Billy Pilgrim’s past comes back for them to relive. As Billy is trying to “reinvent himself” he finds himself frolicking in his childhood at the Grand Canyon (Vonnegut 112). Billy was twelve years old when his mother and father took him on vacation to the Grand Canyon. Billy hated the Grand Canyon is was for certain that he would fall into the Bright Angel Point (Vonnegut 12). Approximately ten days after visiting the Grand Canyon, Billy visited Carlsbad Caverns. “The Caverns had been discovered by a cowboy who saw a huge cloud of bats come out of a hole in the ground” (Vonnegut 113). When
When Vonnegut created Billy Pilgrim, he made Billy subject to the experience of the war. In fact, Billy experiences it almost. exactly the same as Vonnegut himself had, including the experiences of being a POW and in the firebombing of Dresden. The. But in Billy's case, Vonnegut writes it with.
The main event that leads Billy to all his confusion is the time he spent in Dresden and witnessed the fire-bombings that constantly pop in his head along with pictures of all the innocent people Billy saw that fled to Dresden the "safe spot" from the war before the bombing. When Billy sees the faces of the innocent children it represents his fear of the situation. Billy can't acknowledge the fact that they were innocent and they were killed by Americans, Americans soldiers just like himself. The biggest issue Billy cannot come to grasp with is why the bombings took place. That question has no answer; it's just something that happened that Billy couldn't get over. During all Billy's travels back to Dresden he couldn't change what had really happened there although that was the closure he was looking for. Dresden purely represents Bill's past and fears of the truth about what happened.
In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, he talks about World War II and the bombing of Dresden. He writes about this historical event through the character Billy Pilgrim, Billy is drafted into the army at age twenty-one during World War II. He is captured and sent to Luxembourg and then later Dresden as a prisoner. Throughout the novel Vonnegut constantly ridiculous Billy. He describes Billy as a character that has no individualism and no choice in anything that happens in his life. Billy is used to show that everything happens because of fate. As a prisoner Billy has no control over his day to day life. While Billy is in Dresden the city is bombed, because of luck, only Billy and a few others survive the bombing in a slaughterhouse.
According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), there is a “great deal of confusion associated with the label ‘Pit Bull,’” as it does not refer to a single breed of dog, but rather to a group of breeds with similar characteristics1. These characteristics include short hair, a wide skull and shoulders, muscle definition, stocky build and a deep jawline, the combination of which create a dog that manages to strike fear into a perfect stranger. The term ‘Pit Bull’ is derived from the bulldog, which was originally bred as a hunting dog for large game, but has since developed into a “loyal companion rather than a working dog.”1 Their history as “gripping dogs” for hunters follows them into modern society, as many of these dogs have been inhumanely pitted against one another as well as other animals for sport and for human entertainment1. It is because of these illegal fighting rings that ‘Pit Bull’ type breeds have become the subje...
Many people will argue that the pit bull breed should be banned due to their vicious and unpredictable nature. There is a belief that they are inherently evil creatures and that they have a genetic predisposition to be destructive killing machines. In many states and cities this has brought about breed specific legislation. Breed specific legislation bans or regulates the ownership of specific breeds of dogs, which almost always includes pit bulls.
Pit Bulls are not the aggressive breed that everybody makes them out to be. I can understand why there are some people who think that pit-bulls are just mean, but if you get past the looks, they are just big babies.
Billy Pilgrim is the main character of Slaughterhouse-Five. He is a father, spouse, successful oculist, survivor of the Firebombing of Dresden, and a World War II veteran. Billy was a college student studying optometry when he got drafted to enter the military. He was directed to fight in Luxembourg; Battle of the Bulge, and a war against the Germans. During the war he was caught by a swarm of German soldiers. While being held captive, Billy gets on almost everyone's bad side, being so weak, sad, and worthless. He also has persistent bad dreams that keep him up at night, but where many people do not survive, he does. His broken knowledge of time displays how the trouble of reporting disturbing occurrences calls for uncommon literature skills. Even though he has annoying traits, he manages to make it through a horrible atrocity called the FIrebombing of Dresden.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of Billy Pilgrim 's capture by the Nazi Germans during the last years of World War II. Throughout the narrative, excerpts of Billy’s life are portrayed from his pre-war self to his post-war insanity. Billy is able to move both forward and backwards through his life in a random cycle of events. Living the dull life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a provocative woman on the planet Tralfamadore, and simultaneously an American prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. While I agree with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt that Slaughterhouse-Five effectively combines fact and fiction, I argue that the book is more centralized around coping.
When Billy Pilgrim goes to war in Germany, he is soon captured by the Germans and taken to a prisoner camp. While there, he is mocked and ridiculed. He is a very passive character, and so is not bothered by this taunting, but when Billy realizes that the war doesn’t just affect soldiers and people, but all animals, such as the horses they find after the bombing of Dresden, his life is scarred forever. He sees that the horses are bleeding from their mouths and that they are in agony when walking. When Billy sees that his colleagues had mistreated the horses, he realizes that that is what war does to the entire world. Billy is forever changed and even weeps (197). This may have been the trigger for PTSD in Billy’s life to begin with.
Though he was able to escape war unharmed, Billy seems to be mentally unstable. In fact, his nightmares in the German boxcar at the prisoners of war (POW) camp indicate that he is experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): “And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car. Nearly everybody, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away” (79). Billy’s PTSD is also previously hinted when he panics at the sound of sirens: “A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War III at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon” (57). The most prominent symptom of PTSD, however, is reliving disturbing past experiences which is done to an even more extreme extent with Billy as Slaughterhouse-Five’s chronology itself correlates with this symptom. Billy’s “abduction” and conformity to Tralfamadorian beliefs seem to be his method of managing his insecurity and PTSD. He uses the Tralfamadorian motto “so it goes” as a coping mechanism each time he relives a tragic event. As Billy struggles with the conflict of PTSD, the work’s chronological order is altered, he starts to believe
The American Pit Bull is considered as a genuine breed because there are various breeds of pit bull that could have been mixed with other dogs. Pit bulls were raised for baiting larger animals during the hunting seasons. With the faithfulness of t...
Billy Pilgrim is also not like Pilgrim who is the main character in the “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, although they have same last name. His experience is very horrible in the war, there are just have violence and cruel, like the soldier who is in the “Three musketeers”. Imaginary, a man who just naive and have a great lucky, how can he keep his life in the war, just lucky? It is funny. Thus, though the whole novel “Slaughter-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character, Billy Pilgrim is a contradictory person who has the naive and sane attitude together, in almost time he looks like a child, but his wise can “see” at his speaking and action, likes his speaking “So it goes.” (2) Not only is the indifference to the lives, or the hatred and