Soldiers that have been in war have seen things, done things, or heard things, that will are deeply disturbing to most people. When this happens to soldiers they may possibly begin to have issues such as PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This means that they become violent at times, start to cry for no apparent reason, or even start to have flashbacks that takes them back to the war they had been in. I believe that Billy
Pilgrim has PTSD in the book Slaughterhouse Five and there are many ways that this becomes apparent throughout Kurt Vonnegut’s novel.
The first reason which proves that Billy Pilgrim has PTSD is this quote from the book “He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the event in between.” (Vonnegut 14) This help support my thesis due to the fact that he travels through time and has seen his death and birth multiple times already. It also helps to support my thesis by the fact that he randomly goes back to different times of his past and relives them. My first secondary quote comes from “PTSD Symptoms and Family
Versus Stranger Violence in Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans,” “The results provide limited support to the hypothesis that PTSD ‘flashbacks’ in veterans are linked to violence.” This secondary quote from “PTSD symptoms and Family Versus Stranger Violence in Iraq and
Afghanistan Veterans” helps support my thesis due to the fact most that veterans from the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars, they tend to have flashbacks that triggered or supported by violence for the most part. This helps me due to the fact Billy tends to travel back or have flashbacks that involves violence from the time he was in the war and when he was in
Dresden POW’s camp.
My second quote from the book Slau...
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...ing the time periods after the Second World War, people hadn't really diagnosed PTSD yet so veterans from the war, in example: Billy Pilgrim, that had it the doctors, family members, etc... couldn't really help out the veterans with their condition.
In conclusion, I believe that I had backed up my thesis with evidence (quotes) from the book itself to help me state that my thesis was right. I had also found three secondary evidence (quotes) from reliable sources that will back up my primary evidence for my thesis. I had backed up my thesis throughly without others really being able to dispute my thesis since I have found reliable information from reliable sources. In final I had explained and back up my thesis that I believed that Billy Pilgrim has PTSD in the book Slaughterhouse Five and there are many ways that this becomes apparent throughout Kurt Vonnegut’s novel.
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition, similar to an anxiety disorder, that is triggered by trauma and other extremely stressful circumstances. Throughout the book, Junger talks about PTSD in a wide range:from PTSD rates in natural disaster victims to PTSD rates in veterans. The latter is explained on a deeper perspective. While Junger gave many examples of why PTSD rates in America were so high, the most captivating was:
Within the novel Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Billy Pilgrim claims to have come “unstuck” in time. Having survived through being a Prisoner of War and the destruction of Dresden during World War II, and having been a prisoner used to clear away debris of the destruction, there can be little doubt that Pilgrim’s mental state was unstable. Furthermore, it may be concluded that Pilgrim, due to the effects of having been a Prisoner of War, and having been witness to the full magnitude of destruction, suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which caused him to review the events over and over during the course of his life. In order to understand how these factors, the destruction of Dresden and ‘PTSD’, came to make Billy Pilgrim “unstuck” in time, one must review over the circumstances surrounding those events.
The reality that shapes individuals as they fight in war can lead to the resentment they have with the world and the tragedies that they had experienced in the past. Veterans are often times overwhelmed with their fears and sensations of their past that commonly disables them to transgress and live beyond the emotions and apprehensions they witness in posttraumatic experiences. This is also seen in everyday lives of people as they too experience traumatic events such as September 11th and the fall of the World Trade Center or simply by regrets of decisions that is made. Ones fears, emotions and disturbances that are embraced through the past are the only result of the unconscious reality of ones future.
Due to the lack of free will, he recognizes that no person can change fate. As well as a
Billy Pilgrim time travels to various moments in his life at random, which suggests he has no power over his mind and the memories that haunt him. He “is spastic in time, (and) has no control over where he is going next” (Vonnegut 43), as he struggles to make sense of his past. Billy’s ability to remember events in an erratic sequence, mirrors the happenings of war. War is sudden, fast paced, and filled with unexpected twists and turns. Billy cannot forget what he experienced during his time as a soldier, and in turn his mind subconsciously imitates this hectic quality of war. This behavior proves that although the war is over, “psychologically, Billy has never fully left” (Vees-Gulani). For many soldiers, especially those who were prisoners of war (POW), it is inevitable that their mind will not be like it once was (Vees-Gulani).
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.
Billy is used to showing 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. The people of Tralfamadore tell Billy that humans do not understand time because everything they do is in singular progression.
One thing that clearly helped as it would in most cases was to read the book. Not only does it provide you with quotations that helt support your thesis, but also gives you an understanding what criticisms would be appropriate to use.
Post traumatic stress disorder to most people is a soldier that has just come back from
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.
After serving in World War Two, Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five about his experiences through Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five is a dark novel about war and death. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental disease that inflicts people who endured a traumatic event. Some of the common symptoms include flashbacks and creating alternate worlds which Billy Pilgrim experienced various times throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim believes he has become “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 29) and travels to different moments throughout his life. Pilgrim is never in one event for long and his flashbacks are triggered by almost everything he does. While his “time-traveling” is sporadic and never to a relevant time, all of Billy Pilgrims flashbacks are connected through actions done in each of the visions. Perhaps the most important flashback occurred at ...
Nash (2007) points out that soldiers exposed to combat have predictable fears, such as the fear of death or serious injury and the loss of fellow soldiers. Several studies have found, however, that these expected fears are not as pervasive as those who have not served in combat may expect (Grossman, 2009).
Who would have guessed that? Along with war comes experiences that many haunt a person or will never be able to let go of. 70% of adults in the U.S. have experienced a traumatic event (PTSDUnited). PTSD or Posttraumatic Stress Disorder comes home with many soldiers. Most of the time they can't make sense of what is going on and why they are acting the way they are. In the book Slaughterhouse-five Billy Pilgrim goes through many stages of PTSD. Back when World War II was happening doctors weren’t aware of PTSD. The majority of the time doctors just thought that their patients were going crazy, much like what Billy’s daughter was thinking about her father. Classical authors such as Vonnegut put in the element of Billy seeing aliens to make him seem crazy and people to wonder what was wrong with him, because in that time that was the strangest thing that could occur. PTSD is seen as a very large problem after many different situations such as rescuers after a fire, war, and the operators helping someone talk through a tough situation. This book is apart of the literary canon because it is real. It talks about real problems people have and makes it interesting, not only is it fun to read but it's eye opening to see what others
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
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