Psychoanalysis Of Verna In Stone Mattress And Slaughterhouse

Comparison: Verna and Billy Psychoanalysis emphasizes the defense mechanisms and core issues a character can have. During this unit I noticed that the characters Verna from Stone Mattress by Atwood and Billy from Slaughterhouse-five by Vonnegut are similar in their issues along with the fact that they have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Both characters with a distressing event in their lives that leads to their defense mechanisms and core issues. In the Stone Mattress, when Verna was just a young girl she was sexual assaulted by her longtime crush Bob. This event ignites her PTSD along with other issues later on. Her PTSD indicators are flashbacks, negative feelings about oneself or others, and aggressive behavior which Verna displays throughout the
This exposure leads to his PTSD. His indicators are flashbacks, avoidance, and maintaining relationships. Billy watches Dresden burn, “It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke, the sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead. So it goes...” (178). Billy also experiences many stressful events during the war such as seeing a soldier dead for stealing a teapot. His other symptom is avoidance he avoids thinking about all the deaths by putting “and so it goes” at the end of a memory that included deaths. Also has a hard time maintaining his relationship with his wife because, of his reluctance to marry her strains their relationship, “Billy didn't want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life,” (107). Which leads to other defense mechanisms and core issues