During times of war, soldiers experience horrific atrocities that are mentally and physically crippling. Most fail to understand these sinister and morbid images due to their lack of military experience. In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, the main character is Billy Pilgrim, who serves the United States during World War II. Billy is a chaplain's assistant and does not actually engage in combat, allowing him to be an observer of the war rather than an active participant engaged in the battle. His position as an enlisted but unarmed spectator of the war leads to the catastrophic visions and memories that Billy recalls throughout the novel because he witnesses more than most soldiers and is therefore more traumatized. Billy is captured in Germany and held as a prisoner of war in a concentration camp, where he witnesses the total destruction of the city of Dresden. The catastrophes Billy experiences traumatize him for the rest of his life and lead to his psychological deterioration and eventual death. However, Billy uses his imagination to reduce some of the pain, creating memories that help him cope with the trauma. After witnessing the destruction and devastation of war, many soldiers, including Billy, mask the trauma; ultimately leading to their psychological and physical deterioration. However, trauma will always be present throughout a soldier's life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Slaughterhouse-Five is a sort of autobiography of Vonnegut's experiences in World War II, but he writes the novel as historical fiction. Vonnegut chooses this particular style and genre of writing because he is too traumatized by the war to write about his own life and therefore writes indirectly through Billy's life. War is an anonymous and violent way to solve a problem and, once started, it is out of the control of the people and in the hands of the soldiers. However, these soldiers, who represent and fight for their country, do not have as much control as they believe. "There are no characters in war, says [Vonnegut], only pawns, victims. Many victims are children, and, indeed, even the combatants seem like children overwhelmed by events beyond their control" (Reed 4). War is truly beyond anyone's control and death is strongly associated with war. Death is one of the most significant events that lead to trauma, and in war, death is an everyday occurrence, especially for Billy. “One thing was clear: absolutely everyone in the city had to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anyone moving within it was a design flaw” (Vonnegut 230). The bombing and total destruction of Dresden is such a catastrophic event that it is considered even more destructive than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and therefore everyone should be dead. However, Billy is the "flaw in the project" and feels guilty for surviving. Billy is traumatized by his survival because he has to live with the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children are dead, but when the dust settles he is one of the few left. The trauma that Billy experiences during the war recurs when he is involved in a plane crash later in his life where he is the only survivor: the people who first arrived at the scene of the crash were young Austrian ski instructors from the famous ski resort below. They spoke to each other in German as they passed from body to body. They wore black wind masks with two eye holes and a red topknot. They looked like itgolliwog...Billy thought that the golliwog had something to do with World War II, and whispered his address to him: 'Schlachthof-fünf' (Vonnegut 199). Schlachthof-fünf is German for "slaughterhouse five", the name of the building where he lives and works in the concentration camp, and if a guard approaches him, he must recite those words. The war traumatizes Billy so much that after being involved in the plane crash he doesn't know where or when he is and thinks the German-speaking ski instructor is a German guard. Billy continually relives events in the form of distressing images, thoughts, perceptions and dreams: his trauma is an aspect of his life that is beyond his control. The trauma of war exists in soldiers' lives even after combat, and veterans, including Billy, often mask their trauma rather than try to deal with it. Billy uses time travel to mask his grief, spontaneously jumping from one moment in his life to another. "Billy is spastic in time, he has no control over where he will go next, and the trips are not necessarily fun. He is in a constant phase of fear, he says, because he never knows where in his life he is going." having to act later" (Vonnegut 29). Billy's time travel is a way of masking his trauma; if he is not enjoying something, then time travels to another, hopefully, but not always, joyful moment of his life. Billy uses several methods to mask his trauma, one technique is to imagine that something as terrible as death is not as terrible as it is or may seem. "By exercising one's selective memory, by becoming an ostrich, one can in fact live in a world where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts" (Vanderwerken 2). Billy is selective in choosing what he wants to remember, eliminating painful memories by masking them with more desirable and pleasant memories. A popular mask of Billy's pain is the invention of Tralfamadore by his imagination. Billy has the idea that he and the actress Montana Wildhack are being abducted by aliens, Tralfamadorians, and placed in a zoo where they are observed. if painful memories enter his mind, then he instantly travels through time to Tralfamadore. Tralfamadore is a hallucination of the way Billy hides from the pain he endures during the war. The masking of his trauma is evoked in subtle ways; for example, Billy is quite successful in his life after the war. He is president of the Lions Club, works as a successful optometrist, lives in a comfortable upper-middle-class home, and even has two children. Although Billy appears to lead a productive post-war life, there is much beneath the surface that goes unrevealed. Behind the luxury of his success lies a man too torn apart by war to understand what is happening to him. Indeed, Billy, short for William, indicates that he is more of an immature boy than a man, and the war has not made him a better person, but has pushed him into a corner of trauma. War experiences leave veterans, including Billy, traumatized; and while the trauma will never completely go away, there are ways to deal with it and relieve some of the pain. The war has put Billy in a state of constant panic and suffering, never knowing when the horrible memories of the war will resurface. "The price for his (Billy's) survival is a memory haunted by fear and death. He moves from disaster to disaster unable to either banish or accept the Dresden experience" (Berryman 3). The trauma Billy has endured will never go away, despite the many masks he uses to ease his pain. However, there are ways to deal with the trauma and reduce some of the fear and pain. The most significant coping technique Billy uses is thehis invention of Tralfamadore, a place where he is able to heal his emotional wounds. “…Billy Pilgrim, finds only in the delirium of Tralfamadore, with its denial of time and the offering of sex, a way to cope with his survival in Dresden and the numerous deaths before and after” (LeClair 1). Montana Wildhack, with its sexual innuendos and provocations, is Billy's main tool for dealing with his pain, because he talks to her about his painful memories, which helps him deal with his traumatizing experiences. Furthermore, Tralfamadorians believe that time is a continuum of moments. existing simultaneously and not in chronological sequence. Their perception of time explains the format of Vonnegut's novel; each scene is divided by three dots to give the audience an idea of ​​the importance of time. Tralfamadorians also believe that when a person dies they are not actually dead; they are simply in very poor condition at that moment, and are perfectly lively at another moment. This idea of ​​death as meaningless allows Billy to see all deaths, including Dresden's hundreds of thousands, as simply meaningless, discarding all the pain and trauma he had previously had. Billy's new outlook on death leads him to say, "So it goes" every time he mentions death. “Tralfamadorian philosophy, which opposes the attempt to make sense of events, helps Billy deal with the horrible events and their consequences by reinterpreting their meaning” (Vees-Gulani 5). Tralfamadore takes Billy away from the trials and tribulations of the harsh world he lives in by perceiving horrible events, such as death, with optimism. Tralfamadore also offers him new perspectives on life by easing his emotional pain. Vonnegut indirectly helps Billy deal with his trauma while actually dealing with Vonnegut's trauma. "Confronted with courage, narrated and thus elaborated, the trauma of Dresden is exorcised from its dark spell on Vonnegut's imagination" (Giannone 12). Vonnegut has a tremendous amount of repressed emotion and he releases much of it by helping Billy alleviate some of his pain as well. Tralfamadore is the main technique that Billy uses to deal with and even forget the trauma of war. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay The trauma that Billy, along with many For other soldiers, what one endures during war is a pain that can never be given up, and masking the trauma is the worst possible way to deal with the pain. However, there are many ways to deal with trauma; however, some of them are not always helpful, such as Billy's methods of creating the memory of being kidnapped by Tralfamadorians. “Tralfamadore is a fantasy, a desperate attempt to rationalize the chaos, but one must sympathize with Billy's need to create Tralfamadore” (Merrill and Scholl 6). Billy needs to create Tralfamadore to mask his trauma, but as he invites other dwellings onto his fantasy planet, like Montana Wildhack, masking his trauma turns into managing his grief. There is no past, present or future in Slaughterhouse-Five and so it is impossible to decipher what moment in Billy's life he is speaking from. This reflects on the trauma of war that haunts Billy until his death because no matter where you are in your life; trauma, pain and anguish will always exist. Works Cited Berryman, Charles. "After the Fall: Kurt Vonnegut." Studies in Modern Fiction Vol. 26. Gale Literary Database. December 3, 2004. 1-5.Giannone, Richard. "Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels." Literary Resource Center. 1977. Gale Literary Database. Deering HS Lib., Portland, ME. December 3, 2004. 1-18.LeClair, Thomas. "Death and black humor"., 1969.