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Mental Disorders In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

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When someone believes that it’s possible to time travel and get abducted by aliens, they clearly have a mental disorder. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, though it is a fictitious novel, it contains serious and real content. It has its sadistic humor, but it is truly a war story where the outcomes are not good. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is said to be unstuck in time and is abducted by aliens. Though, there is a lot against the reality of that. Billy Pilgrim has a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder. He shows many of the symptoms when showing the audience of his time travel and the abduction by the Tralfamadorians. Vonnegut never officially states whether or not these events are true or not. Much of the research that …show more content…

Nowhere in the book was it clarified that he actually could or couldn’t. Billy Pilgrim is an actual insane person. Not only did he live through a deadly war, he was also a prisoner of it. He then was the only one to survive an airplane crash. He either has a strong case of survivor's guilt, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “PTSD symptoms include recurring memories of and nightmares about combat, sleep difficulties, overreactions to sudden noises or other startling events, and a numbing of emotions” (Bower). Billy Pilgrim shows all of these symptoms multiple times within the novel. These are just a few examples of how Pilgrim can be proved to have PTSD. There have been a number of times that Billy has shown these same symptoms of PTSD. A symptom of Post-traumatic stress disorder is having recurring memories. Billy is said to become unstuck in time to different events in his life. He flashes to memories of Dresden, which is the war that he participated in. He also has episodes of his flight crash, he knows how he will die, and how his wife dies. This book is so sporadic, the audience never truly knows when this book is taking place in Billy’s life. Each page could contain three or more different events in Billy’s

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