He's Not Crazy

Writing about war must be a very intense and horrifying thing to do, especially if you actually live through it. I had wondered all through the book why this war book included the aliens of Tralfamadore. I thought it was Vonnegut’s way of describing the post war trauma. As it is well know that the veterans of big bloody wars like WWII or Vietnam experience so much suffering and deaths that it has a mental effect on them after the war. One perfect example was the Colombian Vietnam veteran who went crazy entering a restaurant and killed almost everybody. Even after the wars there are more deaths. In chapter 5 of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut starts to give us clues on what was really going on with Billy Pilgrim. In this chapter they introduce Eliot Rosewater. They were assigned together at the hospital.
“It was Rosewater who introduced Billy to science fiction” Pg 100. This is exactly what the book is about, science fiction. In class we had discussed that science fiction appears after the war and becomes very important. We actually saw the first science fiction movie ever which was very interesting. After this, Vonnegut states:
“And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes. So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.”
This was the last clue, it was the easiest was to tell the story, using this new thing science fiction. So Billy Pilgrim wasn’t crazy, it simply was hard for him to write about what he had experienced.