His provocative personality also raises a lot of questions about who he is and what makes him act the way he does, and if his statements are genuine or may just be a product of traumatic experience.
Billy Pilgrim has two kids, a son and a daughter. Occasionally, when Billy isn’t “time travelling”, he will be at home, with his daughter who takes care of him from time to time. Whenever she talks to Billy, she uses a gentle voice and kind of talks down to him. Billy tries to tell her about his time travelling experiences and how he has been abducted, but his daughter never believes him. Maybe Vonnegut put this character into the book to symbolize how society handles war veterans. How she was so short with him and always impatient, never taking the time to listen to him, but instead just jumping to the conclusion that he is crazy. On page 131, Billy’s daughter is with him, and she says, “‘Oh my god, you are a child. If we leave you alone here, you’ll freeze to death, you’ll starve to death’” and so on. It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.” His daughter doesn’t even try to understand him, she is just very impatient with him and makes him feel bad about himself, which is something that society tends to do with war veterans. We say “Thank you for your service!” and then go on with our daily lives, because their mental damage isn’t really “our problem”. I think Vonnegut used her to portray how society usually handles war veterans, and how it’s never really in a good way.
My partner Josh found a quote that says, “When the plane smacked into the top of sugarbush mountain in vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy and the copilot. So it goes.” (Vonnegut 156)Josh’s quote relates to my ideas because this is the second time in the book that Billy talks about the plane crash at Sugarbush mountain, however when he first said something he said that Billy was the only one that survived, and now he says that the copilot dies too. This is possibly showing how Billy is just insane, experiencing memory loss and brain malfunctions. My other partner, Brendan, used the quote, ”'My God--what have they done to you, lad? This isn't a man. It's a broken kite.'" (Vonnegut 97) Brendans quote shows how war affects people. How the experiences can “break” a person, which supports my idea because I think Billy was insane and this person agrees. And my final partner, Joey, used the quote, "There are no characters in this story and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now." (Vonnegut 164). Joeys quote literally says, “One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” This could mean during the war or after the war. But it shows that people tend to lose themselves in the battle and they are never really found, which I think happened to Billy.
Billy often talks of time travel and how he can go back and forth through moments in time. This can’t possibly be true, aliens and time travel are things of science fiction. Billy was in a very brutal war. He was at the Dresden bombing which was a horrible moment in World War II. So you begin to think that Billy has gotten Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and this is a coping mechanism for it. Now these are just some questions about Billy, what about the bigger picture. What can affect a society? How much does a war affect someone's humanity?
Lets look at society. Billy Pilgrim has two kids, a son and a daughter. Once he returns from the war, his family begins to question him, question his thoughts. They become short with him and just assume he's crazy for talking about aliens and time travel. On p.26 it says, “Barbara was 21 years old, but she thought her father was senile, even though he was 46. Senile because of the damage to his brain from the airplane crash.” His daughter thinks he is losing his mind. A family is a part of society and these thoughts and ideas Billy talks about disrupts his personal society. You still don’t ever know what’s true because on p.157 it says, “Billy was unconscious for two days after that, and he dreamed millions of things, some of them true. The true things were time travel.” Billy constantly talks about these things and everyone thinks he is crazy, but what if he’s not. Just another question raised by this book.
Humanity is different. Humanity is the human race or the quality that makes us human. Does war take that away from us? People killing people. The destruction of whole cities and countries. All for what, nothing. That’s why people come back from war with post traumatic stress disorder. The things they have to do are awful. "'My God--what have they done to you, lad? This isn't a man. It's a broken kite.'" p.97, an englishman says this to Billy, this quote shows that the destruction of war is very noticeable. Also the mental factor can be bad. On pg.164, it says, "There are no characters in this story and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters." This quote shows that when you go to battle, you can be your average guy. After war, you are nowhere near the person you use to be. You lose yourself in battle, and not many people can find themselves again, which I think happened to Billy.
Slaughterhouse 5 causes a reader to think about many different essential questions about human nature and society. One of the larges questions, really two, is the fact of how we view life and death. the more interesting of the two is death, because there is a lot to be said about it. Most of the human race fears it, and spends most of their life trying to avoid or find a way around it. Billy pilgrim, the main character in the book, views death very differently than other people. The fact that he can time travel and learned what he knows about death from the Tralfamadorians, an alien race that he was abducted by means he has a little bit
While our group had different thoughts about the meaning behind this book, we all could agree that Billy had mental issues. What we all question, however, is whether or not his mental instability was caused by the war or not. Maybe Billy has just always been insane. We all addressed Billy’s sanity at one point or another in our essays. While we used different examples and went about the question in a different way, there was the same base question of whether or not Billy was sane.
http://www.ptsd.va.gov/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II