slaughterhouse five essay

One definition of madness is “mental delusion or the eccentric behavior arising from it.” Yet Emily Dickinson wrote: Much Madness is divinest sense to a discerning Eye. Novelists, such as Kurt Vonnegut Jr., have often see madness with a “discerning eye.” In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut conveys madness through Billy Pilgrim, a traumatized war veteran who believes he has become “unstuck in time”. Pilgrim’s life after the war consists of periods of his life, in no chronological order, printed together in disarray that collectively tells the story of his life.
Billy Pilgrim lived most of his life as a normal man until the night of his daughter’s wedding. Billy claims that he was abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians from the planet Tralfamadore and ever since, he had been traveling back and forth into different periods of his life. These aliens that Billy claims he was abducted by live their lives in the fourth dimension, meaning that they see things in the past, present, and future. His family and friends think he’s had a complete mental break down and struggle to keep tabs on him while his daughter, Barbara, acts as his primary care taker. Barbara doesn’t understand her father and his war trauma and she is constantly frustrated by his delusions. Billy’s madness in the novel throws him back and forth and he never knows where he’ll end up next. His constant travel among intermediate moments of his life gives the reader a chance to experience the novel in the "Tralfamadorian" way, as an apparently random series of moments without a definite beginning or end. This is perhaps Billy’s way of showing that he was actually abducted by the aliens and he’s giving the reader some insight into his mind and personal experiences.
The lingering question throughout the book it whether Billy was actually abducted or not. The reasonable explanation for Billy’s fantasies is that he is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder from his days in the war or the injury he