Essay on Tralfamadore- Truth or Imagination - 758 Words

Can troublesome war experiences really play a role in causing hallucinations? A hallucination is a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside of one’s mind. An individual who suffers from hallucinations is Billy Pilgrim. Billy, a person who can supposedly time travel, jumps between his time on the alien planet Tralfamadore, his experiences during World War II, and his captivity in a German prison camp. His hallucinations may have been caused by the airplane crash that damaged his brain. He believes that there is a planet named Tralfamadore, far from Earth, and that he has been kidnapped and taken there to be studied. Throughout the novel, Billy believes that what he sees is real while many others, like his daughter†¦show more content†¦Furthering the resemblance between Billys hallucinations and The Big Board, a girl is also kidnapped and taken to planet Tralfamadore. She is a woman named Montana Wildhack, who is also displayed in a zoo, naked, and is forced to mate with Billy. Billy’s imagination appears to be coming right out of the book because his experiences on Tralfamadore mirror what happens to the people in the book. Also he reads a lot of Kilgore Trout books and they are all about science fiction and aliens. Just like Zircon-212, Tralfamadore is not because Billy remembers what he has read in Kilgore Trouts books and makes it into his reality. Billy not only consumes the plot from Kilgore Trout books but also uses his personal experiences to trigger Tralfamadore. Billy’s similarities between his personal experiences and his life at Tralfamadore question the existence of that planet. People, when they go to war, return with very disturbing memories. Since Billy went to war, one could see that he makes a getaway from the horrors of war by letting his thoughts run desolate and creating a fictional planet named Tralfamadore. One time is when he was kidnapped and he was â€Å"introduced to an anesthetic to put him to sleep† (77). As soon as he fell asleep he felt the acceleration of the saucer as it left Earth and regained consciousness to when he was in a boxcarShow MoreRelated Comic and Tragic Elements in Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five1485 Words   |  6 Pageseach dimension by contrasts in its comic and tragic elements. The historical seriousness of the Battle of the Bulge and the bombing of Dresden are c ontrasted by many ironies and dark humor; the fantastical, science-fiction-type place of Tralfamadore is, in truth, an outlet for Vonnegut to show his incredibly serious fatalistic views. The surprising variations of the seriousness and light-heartedness allow Vonnegut to show effectively that war is absurd. The most important historical plot strandRead MoreInsanity of War in Slaughterhouse Five1504 Words   |  7 Pageseach dimension by contrasts in its comic and tragic elements. The historical seriousness of the Battle of the Bulge and the bombing of Dresden are contrasted by many ironies and dark humor; the fantastical, science-fiction-type place of Tralfamadore is, in truth, an outlet for Vonnegut to show his incredibly serious fatalistic views. The surprising variations of the seriousness and light-heartedness allow Vonnegut to show effectively that war is absurd. The most important historical plot strandRead MoreTralfamadore: An Escape To Sanity1879 Words   |  8 Pagestime-traveling World War II chaplain’s assistant, through his wartime experiences as well as his expeditions to Tralfamadore, the planet where he is taken and put on display by aliens who strongly resemble plungers. The Tralfamadorians teach Billy the concept that time is unalterable, and that any event that happens has happened and will forever happen. There is no free will on Tralfamadore. Destiny is unalterable: I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the RockyRead MoreKurt Vonneguts Tragic Path to Success1128 Words   |  5 Pagestoo simplistic, he has a following of readers who like his imagination and sense of humor, both humorous and dark. He was both irreverent and highly moral at the same time, and this unusual combination has made his voice fundamental to American literature. Kurt Vonneguts most notable work the classic Slaughterhouse-Five starts with Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is taken by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a scrambling display of skill, it follows Pilgrim concurrentlyRead More The Thought-experiments in Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five or the Childrens Crusade: A Duty Da3375 Words   |  14 Pagescosmic irony with its continuous laughter at systems and philosophies and its paradoxically pragmatic attempts at dealing with the new view of reality (Lundquist 88). The reader is left with an uncertainty of where the actual experience ends and imagination begins. The novel forces the reader to become more involved with the text, suspecting the validity of every piece of the novel; the reader is brought closer into the text, closing the gap between the reader and the author. Thus Vonnegut transformsRead MoreThe Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman2534 Words   |  11 Pagesappearance and reality, and to show how human beings distort or conceal the latter’. The role of unreliable narrator within science-fiction is rendered yet more complicated through the introduction of an array of plot mechanisms limited only by the imagination of the author. Similarly, narrative reliability can become confused through the employment of altered mental states. This essay will consider mental illness and the use of intoxicants (specifically illegal psychoactive substances) within a pairing