Before reading the book, I had an idea that Vonnegut's writing style or ideas would be a little different from conventional authors since this is a class about postmodernist writing after all. Since the book is "one of the world's great antiwar book" you would expect there to be a made up planet that the main character of the book gets abducted to, right? Wrong. What a curveball that Vonnegut threw at the readers. Even though this is an odd idea to me, it actually worked pretty well in portraying what war could do to one's mind.
Following World War II, Billy Pilgrim doesn't show very many signs of a mental collapse other than a mild nervous collapse in which he was given shock treatments. He lives a normal life and even enjoys great success in becoming rich. But after the plane crash in 1968 in which he is the only survivor, everything goes for the worse. He claims to be abducted to the planet Tralfamadore and has all of these experiences on the planet. I believe that Billy goes through this because he is so torn from all the what he witnessed at Dresden that he tries to escape from a world that would allow such a thing to happen by hallucinating.
Tralfamadore and their theory on death is just a coping mechanism for Billy to try to come to terms with his experiences. In the end although it is a strange tactic that I would never expect, it is an effective way to show the horrors of war and demonstrate how thoroughly traumatized a soldier becomes after experiencing the cruelty of war.
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