Is Billy Pilgrim Sane? Essay

billy club Pilgrim coquets a very influential role as the chief(prenominal) character in Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse 5. Since the novel is based totally on he-goat Pilgrims interaction with the environment around him, pinpointing billy clubs state of sanity on the scale of normality garters the contributor determine what is really happening, and what is a figment of truncheons imagination. originally making the decision regarding batons state of headway, one and all(a) must(prenominal) first gear establish the parameters of what is rolled sane and what is non. What one person may consider insane an opposite may consider pure genius. The dictionary commentary of sane is free from psychogenic derangement having a sound, healthy mind. save the general consensus for sane is a lot closer to having or present reason, sound judgment, or good sense. Once those guidelines atomic number 18 set up, one can proceed to analyze batons state of mental health. Since he-goat is a fictional character in a book of account and the man who wrote the book is dead, the only information available to someone try to analyze Billy is through Billys actions/thoughts/experiences and the speculations of other readers.luckily one is not required to delve very deep into Billys past before coming across tragedy. At a very young age Billy is thrust into the middle of dry land War Two. He is ill equipped and has no fighting teach or experience. During the battle of the Bulge Billy becomes lost with one other soldier and two sc issues. While hiking through the underbrush in German territory Billy is overcome with cold and waits for the eventuality that is death to hold over him and remove his soul from his body. Instead Billy becomes what the narrator describes as unstuck in elevator cartridge holder. This is the first time that Billy ever experiences time travel. There ar at least two ways to interpret this scene. In the first one, the reader assumes that Billy is in shock, is delirious, and has a very vague connection with the outside world. This thought is followed by the conterminous logical idea that since Billy is nearly incapacitated, anything odd he experient in this time frame did not actually happen. However each Yin has a Yang. The second way this could be interpreted is that Billys mindhas lost touch of reality to the point it sheds its boundaries regarding time, freeing Billy from the human confines of viewing time in a elongated fashion. Since the decision regarding Billys sanity is based purely on a readers personal opinion.A reader would do head to create a mental tally chart of notes. If the first interpretation makes much sense, simply put a intent in the insane column, however if the second interpretation floats your boat, make a mark in the sane column. Between the first major occurrence and the second, Billy is faced with minor issues that may or may not play an influential role on Billys state of mind and so ev en though they play minor roles, it is important that they are mentioned and taken into account. While Billy is a prisoner of war he is treated poorly, underfed, kept in a crowded train car full of viral and bacterial diseases and scented with the touch of death. It is during this time that Billy manages to make the good train car hate him, causing him to engage further into the safety of his mind. Whether this train ride actually affected Billy or not is up to the reader to decide.The second of Billys major experiences that carries the capability to instil a mental illness in an otherwise healthy being would be the onslaught of Dresden. While Billy was being used for labour in Dresden, his deliver country flak bombed him along with the rest of a city full of civilians. Billy waited out the bombing in an underground meat cooler along with a group of other prisoner of wars and their guards. After the ground had cooled, the POWs emerged from their safe haven and was faced with wh at can be describe as the moons surface. Billy was eventually ordered to help collect the bodies for a mass burial. Now, whether it was sitting underground listening to an entire city being levelled, or the retrieval of dead bodies or both that scarred Billy, it is hard to know. However Billy did have a flashback of the bombing during his eighteenth wedding anniversary that caused him to freak out. However in that location is no direct evidence that the bombing caused Billy to go insane and only the reader can decide if it was pertinent to his mental stability or not. Another traumatizing incident endured by Billy was the combination of him being the touch on subsister of a plane crash followed by his wifes untimely death.While Billy was on his way to an optometry convention with some(prenominal) other optometrists, the plane he is on crashes. He is the only survivor and is rushed to the hospital. When Billys wife hears what happened, she rushes tothe hospital. On her way there she ends up crashing the car and loses her exhaust system. She ends up dying of Carbon Monoxide inebriety right as she stops in front of the hospital. Because of Billys constant time-travelling, he never really knew his wife too well so the odds of him feeling overly distraught because of her death are really quite minimal. Also because he has adopted the Tralfamadorian view of death, he would probably just imagine that now she is in a conk out place in her life.So even though this may not be the happiest point in Billys life, in this causalitys opinion, it is doubtful that it has altered his state of mind, however everyone is entitled to their own opinion and so a reader may interpret otherwise. Although sounding at Billys past may give hints as to his sanity, looking at his actual thoughts would be a lot more helpful in making the final decision.BibliographyFindley, Timothy. The Wars. New York Penguin Group Australia, 1977.