Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

“That's the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.” Slaughterhouse Five 111 Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been widely discussed as an antiwar novel based on the author's own experiences in World War II. As a German POW, Vonnegut witnessed the bombing and complete destruction of Dresden, and Slaughterhouse-Five is the author's manifestation of what he called “a process of twenty years […] of living with Dresden and the aftermath” (Allen 163). Indeed, the words that describe the war, the Dresden events, and their effect on the people who experienced them did not come easily to Vonnegut. In an interview in 1974, he commented on the difficulties of articulating his experiences: “I came home in 1945, started writing about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and WROTE ABOUT IT” (Allen 163). This agony is echoed in the first chapter of the novel