Critical Article

Many people think that Slaughterhouse-Five was an antiwar novel because of Vonnegut's experiences he had when he was in the war. Vonnegut used the book as therapy to try and solve the problems he got from fighing in the war. He writes the book in a way that lets the reader follow his path from being insane to recovery. By Vonnegut writing the book as psychiatric therapy it opens up many ideas of how to deal with your problems, it also shows us a lot about what was wrong with Vonnegut.Billy is a lot like Vonnegut because Billy also fought in a war and he faces a lot of trauma from it. One analysist said that in fiction novels there aren't any characters that have more problems that the characters of Vonnegut. Vonnegut wrote the story to help him out and in the story he made the main character have the same problems and diffuculties that Vonnegut was facing in real life.


This is a brief summary from the critical essay "Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: a psychiatric approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five" found on infotrac