Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim

In the fiction novel "Slaughterhouse - Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, there are many interesting and maybe sometimes strange characters. One in particular is Billy Pilgrim which is the protagonist of the novel. Billy is a World War II veteran, prospering optometrist, husnband, and father. Billy is a character who believes that he has become "unstuck in time". For example in the novel the narrator states that Billy may walk through a door in 1955 and come out another door in 1941. The author uses Billy's belief in order to tell his story and use unusual literary techniques.

Billy Pilgrim can be seen as an unlikely antiwar hero because he has always been a weakling even before the war, since he perfers sinking to swimming, and he becomes somewhat of a joke as a soldier, as Billy was always saved by one of his fellow infantrymen. Billy also gets sent into duty at the Battle of the Bulge without any weapons training, without any weapons, and even with an improper uniform. Which shows the absurdity of the war at this time period and may even satirize the war by depicting the vision of a weak and oblivious man can be sent into war yet not be harmed at all. Aside from all of this craziness Billy has no fear of death because of the Tralfamadorian philosophy

of accepting death. The Tralfamadorians are a figment of Billy's distrubed mind and is used as a coping mechanism to explain all the hardships that Billy has witnessed and lived as his father dies from a hunting accident as he is about to go to war and when 130,000 people die in Dresden, and when his wife accidentally dies from carbon monoxide. All of these deaths treated with equal dignity by saying "So it goes." after each death.

I can relate with Billy with a lot of these whether its being pushed into something even though I am not ready for it or whether I make