Trauma can corrupt one’s mindset by taking over normal thoughts with negative events that occur throughout a lifetime. For example, in the novel, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character Billy Pilgrim was involved with World War II in 1967. He often had flashbacks that go back to this time. Many readers assume that Billy has the mental disease, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is triggered by experiencing, or seeing terrifying event(s). Billy’s case, the war has corrupted his mind, making him believe that he, “... Had been kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians on the night of his daughter’s wedding… The Tralfamadorians had taken him through a time warp, so that he could be on Tralfamadore for years, and still be away from Earth for only a microsecond” (26). This causes him to think differently than most other “normal” people in a society. The quote, “So it goes” (27), which is repeated a numerous amount of times throughout the book, shows how Billy is shying away from the idea of death because the “Tralfamadorians” told him that all moments in time exist at once. What this quote means is that Billy Pilgrim doesn’t want to, or just doesn’t understand, the meaning of death anymore. The aliens don’t really exist, he is going slightly crazy, and this is his way of dealing with war trauma. “He asked himself this: “Where have all the years gone?” (57). This quote relates to him being able to “time travel” and shows how the war mentally affected him.
In Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim suffers from intense war trauma. This had a huge impact on his mind, and forces his brain to relate familiar objects to ones in the war, “The fish were as big as submarines” (45). PTSD comes into play when you wonder about how war affects his way of thinking. It makes you think, when you connect the Tralfamadorian way of thinking with the effects of PTSD. It makes you think whether the aliens are real or not, whether Billy is really experiencing this. In my opinion, I think the Tralfamadorians and the alien world is just a way of Billy coping with his war trauma. He is making a false reality that draws him away from the scarring events of the war. This seems oddly normal for someone like Billy- a kid who got thrown into the war, knowing nothing of the horrors of combat. That is what I think this book is about- a kid unknowingly thrown into the horrors of war, and his way of dealing with the trauma. “The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed” (5).
Trauma in everyday life can be very challenging in society. It causes one to experience an unusual surrounding from what is normal. With Billy Pilgrim, trauma has caused his mind to deteriorate slowly, piece by piece, but it has a big effect on him. There are numerous examples in the novel that explains Billy’s sanity, and how trauma and death has affected him mentally. “Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say. But Billy didn’t really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it” (192). When Billy encounters death, at any point, he thinks about what the Tralfamadorians had taught him. “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other *memories* moments” (27). I believe that this trauma came from the death Billy has experienced in the war; that he is trying to run away from the idea of death, trying to see death in a different perspective.
So to answer the question, “How does trauma affect society?” It takes a person who used to fit into society, and throws them off the normal path, it causes them to act in unusual, perplexing ways. This leads to them being rejected and abandoned in society. That is what we think this book is about- a boy involved in a man’s war, and his tribulations of dealing with the trauma during and afterwards.