Analysis Of Billy Pilgrim's Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-five is about a man named Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim was born in 1922 and grew up in New York. He does reasonably well in school. While attending college to become an optometrist he is drafted in to the army. He trains to be a Chaplain Assistant. He is taken Prisoner in the battle of Bulge in Belgium. Right before his capture Pilgrim experiences his first flashback were he sees his entire life flashes before him. The Germans put him into a boxcar to Germany. Once he arrives he experiences a breakdown and get a shot of morphine and experiences another flashback. The POW are transported to Dresden to work manual labor. There is a slaughterhouse that is located in Dresden which become important later in the book. The US bombs Dresden and ended up killing 130,000 people. Pilgrim and some other POW survived this
After a nervous brick down Pilgrim is admitted into a veteran hospital where a patient introduced him to a kilgen trout novel. The Night after his daughter wedding Pilgrim goes onto a live radio and states that he was abducted by aliens and displayed in a zoo on their planet. He say nothing more about this until he was in a plane crash on the way to an optometrist convention where he is hospitalized. While his wife is on the way to hospital to visit Billy she dies of CO2 poisoning. Billy predicts that one of the people he met in the war that swore to Billy that he will kill him will come back and shoot him.
Vonnegut uses symbolism in many different aspect of his writing. In Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut uses Billy Pilgrim to symbolize a modern day Jesus Christ. Both Pilgrim and Christ go through a similar enlighten experiences. For Jesus it was when he was baptized “he went under the water. And at that moment heaven was opened and he saw the spirt of god descending like a dove and alighting him”. (Matthew 3:16). Pilgrim had a similar