Billy Pilgrim's Slaughterhouse Five

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Slaughterhouse Five is a story about Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran, a successful optometrist, husband, and a father, who has become unstable and “unstuck in time”. He finds himself going through a stage where he starts to travel into the past and present times of his life, such as visiting his birth all the way through his demise and events prior and in between those two events in his life. Due to the fact that he travels back and forth in time and place, he was unstable and incapable of keeping control of which epoch in his life he would have to deal with next. As Billy Pilgrim travels back and forth, so does the story. The narrative is not in chronological order, in fact, it jumps from setting to setting, out of order, as …show more content…
I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”, Is a quote from Slaughterhouse Five, meaning that you no longer have any control or possession of what happened in the past. What is done today is gone tomorrow and there is absolutely no way of preventing that. I really like and appreciate this quote because I can very much relate to it. When I broke my leg in middle school, and I could not play Water Polo, not even get in the water and have a quick warm up swim, I lamented for weeks at the fact I was out for so long. It tore me inside like no other to stop training and competing every other weekend. I only looked back at the day I decided to do a handstand on a skateboard. I regretted that decision so much and I could not forgive myself until I learned how to accept. I accepted my consequences, sure, but most importantly I accepted that what I did was in my past, and I could only try and better my present for a great future. That moment is the exact moment I learned how to live life to the fullest and appreciate it. I always remind myself that there are two days in your life that you cannot control, one was called yesterday and the other is called tomorrow. Today is …show more content…
In The Diary Of Anne Frank, Anne narrates her personal experiences as a Jewish girl who has to go into hiding during World War Two to escape from the Nazis. With her family, she hides in a secret attic. After more than 2 years, they are found and sent off to concentration camps ran by Hitler and the Nazis. Both Anne Frank and Billy Pilgrim suffer from ongoing events happening during the same era. Slaughterhouse-Five and The Diary of Anne Frank both paint a very vivid image of war as something absolutely devastating. I think what both protagonists have in common is they learned how to cope with their settings and trauma taking place. Anne Frank emphasizes that love and kindness survive the vilest and loathsome people, places, and things. Billy Pilgrim also deals with a lot being a father and a husband, and always changing eras as well. Both stories show the inevitable…. death. Although, they differ because Anne was not aware of when her end was coming, rather than someone who traveled to the past and the future. Therefore Pilgrim knows and assumes when he is going to die. Both stories demonstrate and bring out two amazing, heroic characters in their own special
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