Shell Shock

To us, they fought their last battle days, months, even years ago. But to them, they fight is every single day. It is not only physical injuries carried home by soldiers, but those of the mind as well, with the most common being PTSD. Though it can be interpreted that Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five is actually time traveling, I believe he is hallucinating as a result of PTSD and often those hallucinations seem very real to sufferers of it. Throughout the story Billy has nightmares, is startled very easily, and constantly is recalling horrific events in his life. As a reader we may even begin feeling helpless as a result of the spontaneous flipping through time, similar to how those with PTSD feel. Vonnegut wants to convey to his readers through the experiences of Billy that war is a terrible thing and warps and twists the human mind in many ways. It also makes sense that he would include the disorder in his story because he himself was in war, and some of the events in the story parallel with his life. I think that the way in which Vonnegut wrote the story was very ingenious, on the surface it is a typical sci-fi book much like sufferers of PTSD seem "normal" on the outside, but then you go deeper and realize there is actually much more to the story, like there is much more to a person.