Futile Search for Answers in Slaughterhouse Five :: Slaughterhouse-Five Essays

Futile Search for Answers in Slaughterhouse Five   The book, Slaughter House-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, is based on the main character named Billy Pilgrim who is a little lost in the head. Billy is unendingly traveling to different parts of his life and rarely in the present state. Throughout the book Billy mainly travels back and forth to three big convictions in his life. In each different time period of Billys life he is in a different place his present state is in a town c wholeed Illium and his travels are to Dresden and Tralfamadore. When Billy is in Illium he is suppose to have a normal life he is married, has two children, and works as an optometrist. Then Billy travels back to Dresden where he was stationed in the last years of WWII and witnessed the horrible bombing. When Billy travels to Tralfamadore he is in an imaginary state, everything that happens to him is more like a dream. Through Billys travels in time he shows that he is striving to find meaning in the events that happened in his life that he is afraid to acknowledge. As Billy says himself, All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist, (1) this just proves even further that fact that Billy cannot ever forget any event in his life.   The main event that leads Billy to all his confusion is the time he spent in Dresden and witnessed the fire-bombings that constantly pop in his head along with pictures of all the innocent people Billy sawing machine that fled to Dresden the safe spot from the war before the bombing. When Billy sees the faces of the innocent children it represents his fear of the situation. Billy cant acknowledge the fact that they were innocent and they were killed by Americans, Americans soldiers just like himself. The biggest riposte  Billy cannot come to grasp with is why the bombings took place. That question has no answer its just something that happened that Billy couldnt get over. During all Billys travels back to Dresden he couldnt change what had sincerely happened there although that was the closure he was looking for. Dresden purely represents Bills past and fears of the truth about what happened.