A Problem Of Losing Touch With Reality in Slaughterhouse Five Novel

The difference between living and being alive are two very different states of consciousness. The novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut displays the differences between these two states excellently when telling the story of a World War II veteran, Billy Pilgrim, who drifts through important personal and worldwide events in turmoil, slowly letting go of his grip on life. Vonnegut displays this by having his character witness several disheartening situations and scramble to survive. The price he asks of Billy is to give up pieces of himself for his physical survival.

As the pieces chip away, Billy Pilgrim’s mind strays further and further away from reality into a made up alien world in Tralfamador.

The impact of war on Billy causes the main character to give up his first piece: hope. An individual’s hope is a very personal part of oneself. Hope contributes to one’s confidence in their ability to get better in the face of failure. When Billy is drafted into the war he takes on the job as an assistant but soon finds the hardships of war not to his liking.

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This can be seen when Billy is on the run with his friend Weary and some scouts in the German countryside:

Billy stopped, shook his head. ‘You go on,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You guys go on without me. I’m all right.’

‘You’re what?’

‘I’m O.K.’

Weary kicked and shoved Billy for a quarter of a mile…

‘Here he is, boys,’ said Weary.

‘He don’t want to live, but he’s gonna live anyway’ (Vonnegut 48).

Although Weary seems to allude to the notion that Billy “don’t want to live”, the truth is, Billy has lost hope. Billy has lost hope in himself as a human being as well as the situation. Billy isn’t interested in being helped and this is implied when he says, “I’m O.K.” in big capital letters. By using big letters, Vonnegut indicates Billy isn’t alright, Billy does not have the strength or the stamina to keep on going and he just wants to give up. But Weary doesn’t let Billy fall on the wayside, and manages to force Billy to walk towards survival.

Soon after, Billy takes his first trip to the fictional land of Tralfamador where he is kidnapped and meets the inhabitants, Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians teach Billy unique things such as the idea of “death” and that a person isn’t dead, they exist in all the other moments in their life when they are alive. While this occurs, Billy is actually trapped on a train carrying German prisoners of war to a camp. This is the first time Billy loses his touch with reality and Vonnegut does this to show Billy has started to lose his conscious awareness of being alive.

The second piece that is lost is when Billy leaves the military. Billy returns to his hometown and enrolls in an Optometrist school and gets engaged to Valencia. Valencia is a very large woman whom Billy’s mother sets him up with because her family’s wealth has given her a great inheritance:

‘He’s engaged to a very rich girl,’ said Billy’s mother.

‘That’s good,’ said Rosewater, ‘Money can be a great comfort sometimes,’

‘It really can.’

‘Of course it can.’

‘It isn’t much fun if you have to pinch every penny till it screams…

Billy closed that one eye, saw in his memory of the future poor old Edgar Derby in front of a firing squad in the ruins of the war (Vonnegut 104-105).

When Billy goes home everyone around him acts as if the war didn’t happen. No one will talk about the horrible Dresden firebombing, and many just avoid the subject altogether. Yet it’s not enough to let Billy sulk in his situation, Vonnegut mixes in Billy’s mother who waves away his freedom by setting up a loveless match. As the mother states, “Money can be a great comfort sometimes” and she says this while visiting Billy at the hospital. She fusses about the materialistic things money can buy for Billy and disregards the fact that Billy is still trying to recover from the war. In contrast, Billy is a long way off, remembering the horror of witnessing the death of a dear comrade while his mother plans his life for him. This moment is key, Vonnegut puts Billy’s future in the hands of others, signifying Billy has given up his will to “live.” Friends and family must now pick up the slack and support and cajole and force the main character, stuck in time travel to Tralfamador.

Now that Vonnegut has established Billy Pilgrim no longer has hope nor does he have the intention or will to continue to exist in reality, the author lets Billy slide into a rapid decline. Billy soon loses touch with his family, and children, and travels to Tralfamador quite often. He even visits “New York City, and appears on an all-night radio program devoted to alien talk. He said, too, that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967” (Vonnegut 25). Then, a few days later, Billy’s daughter Barbara has to go to New York City and fetch a tired, old, man home. The correlation between Billy’s age and the increasing belief he holds in Tralfamador greatly suggests Billy’s aging mind aids in the main character’s loss of awareness. But Vonnegut does add a twist to this notion, and has Billy say to a comrade of his, “How nice–to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive” (Vonnegut 134). This indicates that Billy is fully cognizant of the fact that he is losing his grip on the world around him, and suggests to the reader Billy wants this process to occur. Billy fully intends to leave the actual world behind him for the wonders of feeling nothing and still being alive.

Losing one’s mind is a terrible thing many people endure. Kurt Vonnegut depicts this process in Slaughterhouse Five with the main character Billy Pilgrim stumbling throughout his life, losing touch with reality. Vonnegut blurs the lines between the idea of being alive and not living through Billy’s eyes and thrusts the reader into a confusing world of time travel between war, home, family, and Tralfamador. In the twists and turns that life holds for Billy, the reader is left with the impression that the difference between living and being alive is more complex than one can imagine.