Is Billy Pilgrim Insane

In the book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut the main protagonist is a Scrawny boy from New york named Billy Pilgrim. Throughout his life billy has gone through some pretty serious event's. These event's have convinced him that everything we know about time is wrong. He also believes he was abducted by a race of aliens named the Tralfamadorians, but that's besides the point. Although he believes these things are real, is he insane? On the Fourth of July of 1922, In the city of Ilium, new york a boy named Billy Pilgrim was born. 21 years later the 6 foot 3” Optometry student was drafted into the army. While in Virginia, he served as a chaplain's assistant -Which is a sort of minister-. Later, he was put on the front-lines in Germany in 1944.

At the Battle of the Bulge, Billy is taken prisoner and moved to to a place called "Schlachthof Fünf" (Slaughterhouse Five) In Dresden, Germany.

When the Armed forces firebomb the city Billy takes refuge in an abandoned meat locker. Amazingly, he survives and when he emerges he finds a field of destruction, just days later Russian forces capture the city and he is transported from Germany back to the U.S. Later After having a nervous breakdown, Billy dedicates himself to a veterans’ hospital. While staying in the mental ward, another patient introduces Billy to the science fiction novels of a writer named Kilgore Trout -which is important and I'll explain later-. Soon after he's released from the hospital he marries Valencia Merble -who's father just happened to own the Ilium School of Optometry in his home town-. In 1947, Billy and Valencia's first child Robert is born, and two years later they have a daughter Named Barbara. On her wedding night, Billy is captured by an alien space ship and taken to a planet called Tralfamadore. On that planet, Billy learns the views of the planet's inhabitants the Tralfamadorian's. He also meets -guess who?- a porn` star, who was also abducted, named Montana

Wildhack,
who is believed to have drowned herself. She and Billy eventually fall in love and have a child together. Then he is sent back to Earth to relive past or future moments of his life like a true Tralfamadorian. The past few paragraph’s have been a small back-story to the character and a few of his experiences. Normally, when a man has such events, and sees a group of his close friends die, he would be permanently different. But Billy isn't a normal man; over the time he was on Tralfamadore he learned from the Tralfamadorians that these things just happen, and there is nothing that he, or anyone else can do to stop it. No question his perspective of things has changed since the airplane crash that was involved in. Before the crash and his hospitalization, he was an overachiever that had a prosperous future ahead of him. After the incident, his life started taking even more turns for the worst. His wife died , he lost interest in Optometry, leaving it up to his family to take over the business. Adding on, shortly after his recovery, he decided to tell the world of his abduction by the Tralfamadorians. All this made it hard for anyone to believe him, These accounts also not only embarrassed his family, but it made some feel ashamed to even be related to him. Especially his daughter Barbara, she thought her father was senile even though he was only forty-six. Due to the fact that before the traumatic crash, Billy had never mentioned the planet of Tralfamadore or anything abnormal,which would aid to the claim that he is insane.