Slaughter House-Five By P. T. S. D.

Thousands of veterans are impacted by P.T.S.D., a common mental illness brought on by war and other high trauma situations. Billy was a prisoner of war now suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, which causes him to travel or jump between time. Kurt Vonnegut wrote the book Slaughter-House-Five which illustrates a man who is studying optometry in college. Billy gets into a plane crash and wakes up in a local hospital feeling “stuck” in time. He believes he has the ability to travel in time and gets “unstuck” in the Battle of the Budge in Luxembourg. Billy does not learn to live life in the moment and he is constantly trying to live life in different moments. Living in the moment is the biggest theme throughout the novel and is what Kurt Vonnegut was trying to portray through Billy and his story.
However no matter how hard he tries, he can not change it, this is because no one can shift these events. The author uses Billy to show that people need to live in the moment because there is no reason to dwell on the past or ponder on the future. “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change, were the past, the present, and the future.” (Vonnegut 60) The author uses this quote to show that he can not think straight and also does not actually have the ability to change time. This is an important quote because it brings a more realistic undertone to the book, instead of it being a time traveling book. It displays to the reader that Billy Pilgram needs to learn to live in the now and not worry about the future nor the