Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five Term Paper

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Through his experiences and adventures, Billy becomes a symbol more than a mere character. He obviously has more insight into how things truly are, than the rest of the characters in the book. Not accidentally, Billy becomes unstuck in time precisely during the Second World War, hinting thus at the need to escape the imminence of death as a constantly pending menace: "The Tralfamadorians didn't have anything to do with his coming unstuck They were simply able to give him insights into what was really going on."(Vonnegut, 18) as such, Billy is the best optometrist because he can correct the vision of the other people, by letting them see "what was really going on." His role is to take the reader away from the immediate reality, and prove the inconsistency of war.

Eliot Rosewater is another important character, introduced as Billy's companion in a mental institution. Rosewater is the one who first initiates Billy in good science-fiction writing, especially into that of Kilgore Trout. In many ways, Rosewater is Billy's guide in the novel. Because he reflects the same anti-war feeling that pervades Slaughterhouse Five, Rosewater seems to be of the same party as Billy and the narrator. I think that Rosewater should be given an award for his belief in science fiction as the only thing able to save humans from their enclosed, immediate reality. The fact that Rosewater takes science fiction as something which is truthful and comforting at the same time indicates that he believes in the existence of alternate worlds.

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As well as Billy or the narrator, Rosewater is a victim of the cruelty that he has seen in the war. A former captain of infantry, he has witnessed enough of war to understand that humanity needs to save itself by re-inventing the universe: "So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help."(Vonnegut, 55) Science fiction is not seen thus as an escapism device, but rather as a way of looking beyond the immediate limits of reality. Rosewater believes that psychology should also be re-invented so that the ugliness of war should be atoned for somehow: "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."(Vonnegut, 56) Finally, Rosewater's belief in the fourth dimension as a locus of the truly fantastic and important things indicates that commonly people have but a limited and incomplete view of reality: "One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth dimension."(Vonnegut, 59)

The narrator of the story, Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater are all important characters, because they manage to convey, each in his own way, a different and more complete view of reality and of the universe.

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"Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five" (2008, January 24) Retrieved June 5, 2026, from
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