After the Trauma, Essay Example

As a young child my mother once told me in her frustration, “I can’t be in three places at once”. Billy was. In Slaughterhouse-Five the former prisoner of war was everywhere and nowhere. His posttraumatic stress took away his ability to be in the moment, to feel, to live. The underlying question is this: did Billy really come home?

On the internet, on the television, and on a back book cover are no longer the honored places to be. However, the literary materials of Suzanne Vees-Gulani are in the EBSCO database of high-end academic material and most of them concern World War II. In sports terminology, she’s the equivalent of bringing in a “ringer”. With her extensive knowledge, expertise, and passion- such as the German equivalent of a Master’s degree that she holds- she is the authority to analyze the accuracy of Vonnegut’s literary depiction of posttraumatic stress disorder following the horrors of mistreatment in Germany during World War II.

Vees-Gulani eases into her analysis of Vonnegut and his character, Billy, by explaining the experiences of Kurt Vonnegut as a prisoner of war during World War II and extolling Slaughterhouse-Five for its value to the critic who wants to “trace his [Vonnegut’s] path to recovery”. While previous readers have occasionally come to the conclusion that Billy was schizophrenic, Vees-Gulani claims that he suffered from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. A conflict then ensues between the appearance of normality and the mental entrapment caused by the disorder, which produces a cycle of socially-debilitating flashbacks. (In one example, a barbershop quartet evokes memories of grieving survivors.) These recollections can be triggered by the smallest sensory perceptions, so Vees-Gulani notes the large number of such details in Slaughterhouse-Five and their importance in establishing a pattern of traumatic memory suppression and avoidance. Furthermore, Billy is accepting and is outside of himself, like a spectator of his own life.  When he seeks help at a psychiatric facility he is told that he is going crazy. Vees-Gulani issues an indictment against psychiatry for its failure to address the influence of circumstances beyond one person’s control and for saying that Billy was damaged goods because “his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy and then had taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon”.  After Billy is convinced by psychiatrists that he is stuck in the realm of insanity, Vees-Gulani says that Billy, like others afflicted with posttraumatic stress, begins to indulge in escapist fantasies, namely in the creation of an alien race whose passive motto is “So it goes”. According to the critic, PTSD sufferers often have trouble vocalizing and even recalling the events without sensory aid, so Billy finds it hard to move past.  She also illustrates the multiple roles of Vonnegut, who writes as though he is Billy, as though he is a conduit to clarify facts, and as though he is but an aloof writer earning a payday. However, Vees-Gulani clarifies a subtler deficiency in American societal denial of- and refusal to aid in- the clarification of wartime details, i.e. what exactly happened, why, and when. Rather than be annoyed at hearing previously-known, horrible World War II facts “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five” contends that Vonnegut was frustrated with his inability to articulate his wartime trauma and that the eventual production of the book was a therapeutic experience for Vonnegut. Vonnegut’s therapy consisted of the separation of the victim of PTSD [Billy], the fiction, and the man on whom the character was based- himself. Vees-Gulani recognizes the importance of facing the trauma head-on, because “avoiding the traumatic memories leads to stagnation in the recovery process”.  She commends him for bringing an issue into the public eye as a way of closing her critique of the book (Vees-Gulani, 1-11).

Works Cited

Vees-Gulani, Susanne. “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.” Critique 44.2 (2003): 175. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 May 2010.