Is Billy Pilgrim Sane? Essay

billy club Pilgrim plays a rattling(prenominal) powerful role as the main sheath in Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse 5. Since the novel is based entirely on wand Pilgrims interaction with the environment around him, pinpointing Billys state of sanity on the scale of normality helps the lecturer break what is really happening, and what is a figment of Billys imagination. Before reservation the finish regarding Billys state of brain, superstar must kickoff establish the parameters of what is considered sane and what is not. What one person may consider buggy an separate may consider pure genius. The dictionary definition of sane is free from mental derangement having a fit, healthy mind. However the ecumenic consensus for sane is a lot closer to having or showing reason, sound judgment, or good sense. Once those guidelines are set up, one ignore proceed to break up Billys state of mental health. Since Billy is a fictional character in a book and the patch who wrote th e book is dead, the only information available to someone trying 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 World state of war Two. He is ill equipped and has no fighting training or experience. During the battle of the Bulge Billy becomes lost with one other pass and two scouts. While hiking through the underbrush in German soil Billy is oercome with cold and waits for the eventuality that is death to pass over him and remove his soul from his body. Instead Billy becomes what the narrator describes as undone in time. This is the first time that Billy ever experiences time blend. There are at least two ways to furnish 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 next limpid idea that since Billy is nearly incapacitated, anything odd he experienced in this time frame did not actually happen. However every Yin has a Yang. The second way this could be interpreted is that Billys mind has lost touch of reality to the point it sheds its boundaries regarding time, freeing Billy from the kind-hearted confines of viewing time in a linear fashion. Since the decision regarding Billys sanity is based purely on a readers personal vox populi.A reader would do puff up to create a mental tally chart of notes. If the first comment confines more sense, simply put a mark in the paranoid 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 confront with minor issues that may or may not play an influential role on Billys state of mind and so even though they play minor roles, it is important that they are mentioned and taken into a ccount. While Billy is a prisoner of war he is treated poorly, underfed, kept in a crowded train car ample of viral and bacterial diseases and scented with the touch of death. It is during this time that Billy manages to make the entire train car hate him, causing him to draw make headway 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 other healthy creation would be the bombardment of Dresden. While Billy was being used for labour in Dresden, his own country fire bombed him on with the rest of a metropolis full of civilians. Billy waited out the bombing in an underground meat cooler along with a stem of other POWs and their guards. After the ground had cooled, the POWs emerged from their safe haven and was faced with what can be described as the moons surface. Billy was eventually ordered to help foregather th e 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 18th wedding anniversary that caused him to freak out. However there is no grade 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. other traumatizing incident endured by Billy was the combination of him being the sole survivor of a plane crash followed by his wifes wrong(p) death.While Billy was on his way to an optometry convention with several other optometrists, the plane he is on crashes. He is the only survivor and is go to the hospital. When Billys wife hears what happened, she rushes to the hospital. On her way there she ends up crashing the car and loses her exhaust system. She ends up dying of Carbon Monoxide poisoning ripe(p) as s he stops in front of the hospital. Because of Billys eternal 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 likely just imagine that now she is in a better fleck in her life.So even though this may not be the happiest point in Billys life, in this authors 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 spirit at Billys past may give hints as to his sanity, looking at his actual thoughts would be a lot more cooperative in making the final decision.BibliographyFindley, Timothy. The Wars. New York Penguin Group Australia, 1977.