Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most well-known American science-fiction writers of the 20th century. His sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, is considered by many critics to be his breakout novel, the one that launched him from obscure cult science-fiction writer to an internationally known and celebrated author. It seems appropriate that Slaughterhouse-Five be the novel to launch Vonnegut to stardom as this novel is perhaps the most auto-biographical offering of Vonnegut’s. Its main character, Billy Pilgrim, closely resembles Vonnegut in many ways. The experiences of Billy Pilgrim are also one’s of Vonnegut, making the comparison even more striking. Through the experiences, thoughts and actions of Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut expresses his own ideas, philosophies and unique way of seeing the world. However, there is much in the scholastic literature pertaining to just what the exact nature of Vonnegut/Pilgrim’s beliefs are. For Vonnegut uses as his main literary tools satire and cynicism, which make interpreting his work a matter of perspective and difficult to grasp in just one read. However, no matter how much interpretations may vary, everyone agrees that this novel is invaluable as a study into the nature of the writer. The novel Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel that gives deep insight into the life and mind of the great American storyteller, Kurt Vonnegut.
The events that Billy Pilgrim experiences in Slaughterhouse-Five, apart from being teleported to another alien realm (at least as far as we know), are ones that Vonnegut actually experienced. This allowed Vonnegut to write with absolute realism as to the thoughts and emotions his character experiences while dealing with the situations he finds himself in. Vonnegut himself was a soldier in World War II, just like Pilgrim. A young and naive young man before going off to war, his experiences in Europe brought him home a changed man, more mature and thoughtful with a deeply scarred soul. The experience central to the novel is the characters experiences in Dresden, Germany as a POW (Coleman 682). Vonnegut had the unlucky experience of being in that fair German city during the infamous Bombing of Dresden, which occurred between the 13th and 15th of February in 1945. This bombing, perpetrated by the Allied forces, all but destroyed the city of Dresden. Pilgrim misses the actual bombing. As a POW, he is underground at the time, working in a building known as “Slaughterhouse-Five”, preparing pig meat for the German Army. Though he misses seeing the actual bombing, he is taken out after the bombing is complete and witnesses the terrible aftermath. Thousands upon thousands died during the bombing in Dresden, and the entire city was flattened like a pancake (Rigney 11). Instead of celebrating in the victory of his army in destroying the German town, Vonnegut-as-Pilgrim is disheartened and severely traumatized at the sight. He is forced to work on a clean up crew, dragging dead bodies out of the wreckage, and searching the rubble for any survivors. The experience leaves a deep, dark mark on Vonnegut’s soul, and the experience itself drove him, more than two decades later, to put his experiences into written form as Slaughterhouse-Five (Beidler).

Many of the personal traits, characteristics and ways of thinking that are expressed in Billy Pilgrim are indeed those of Vonnegut. One of the most pronounced psychosocial traits of Pilgrim are schizophrenic tendencies – hallucinations, flashbacks, and social anxiety. These traits can be seen today as those of one who is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Though this syndrome was not recognized at the time that Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, psychiatrists today recognize the symptoms that Pilgrim experiences as being tell-tale signs of the syndrome. Thus, it is not unthinkable to imagine that Vonnegut was a sufferer of PTSD (Vees-Gulani 176-177). This syndrome is common amongst war vets, especially those who experienced a tragedy like the Bombing of Dresden. Due to the trauma he experienced during the war, Pilgrim is adamantly anti-war, a sentiment shared by his creator Kurt Vonnegut (Miska 1). Vonnegut uses Pilgrim as a way to express his deepest, most hard to express feelings, healing himself emotionally by reliving the events through Pilgrim. “…although Slaughterhouse-Five on the surface is Vonnegut’s Dresden novel, on a much deeper level it is also the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man so tormented and haunted by the burden of the past that he finds it necessary to “reinvent” his own reality (Simpson).”

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