Slaughterhouse Five is an interesting book. I think that Billy Pilgrim is the best example so far of a character blending fact and fiction. Billy is either crazy or he is suffering from PTSD. After the war, I don’t think that he is able to face reality. He already seemed to have a hard time to facing reality before the war. He was timid and had a hard time taking care of himself. His father pushed him into the deep end of the swimming pool and Billy almost drowned until he was saved by someone else. Any hope Billy had to become more confident and any interests he may have had disappeared with the war. He was a young innocent boy that was forced to go “fight” a war. And Billy seemed to really have no idea what he was even fighting for. Vonnegut uses Billy as a stereotype to illuminate the reality for many of the boys sent off to war. Billy not only doesn’t want to be there but he shouldn’t be. So he “time-travels”. Billy escapes his reality by going to another point in his life. He believes in the Tralfamadorian idea that a person is always living another part of their life. So even when a person dies they are living in another time. This doesn’t really make sense to me. Does that mean that even before a person is born they are living already? But I think this is Vonnegut’s purpose. He doesn’t want this to make sense. He doesn’t want someone to escape their problems by ignoring them. In the end Vonnegut’s message reminds me of the quote Montana has on her necklace and what Billy has on his wall in his office. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference”. Vonnegut wants people to realize that although there will always be parts of your life that you cannot change, you should change the parts you have control over. And in the end, the only thing you have control over is your actions.