While he was alive, Roland Weary was a constant antagonistic force in Slaughterhouse 5. Despite that, he was very similar to Billy, seeing as he had trouble differentiating between reality and fantasy. Due to low self-esteem from being bullied as a child, he displaced his pain and anger onto Billy after saving him to be seen as heroic, and, in an ironic twist, becoming the bully himself. Alongside that, Weary’s fear of abandonment caused him to latch on to the two scouts who wanted nothing to do with him, creating a fantasy of being “The Three Musketeers” in order to make himself seem important and worthy of attention instead of facing the brutal reality of war in a mature way. Vonnegut uses Weary’s character as a social commentary on how easily…show more content… He’s abusive, rude, standoffish, cruel, and just plain creepy! But he’s a product of his society. He’s an 18 year old boy drafted into war lacking any social skills and morals. He has a rather messed up sense of friendship as a result of being ignored, it is stated that “when Weary was ditched, he would find somebody who was even more unpopular than himself, and he would horse around with that person for a while, pretending to be friendly. And then he would find some pretext for beating the shit out of him” (26). This quote shows how the abandonment affected his psyche even into adulthood. His unlikable personality overrides anything that could make him interesting, resulting in him having no friends, and causing him to have a warped view on how he should treat people. This is shown to be aided by his father’s obsession with weapons and anything violent, especially when the reader learns of the man’s ‘gift’ to his wife, Billy describing it as “a table lamp whose base was a model one foot high of the famous ‘Iron Maiden of Nuremburg.’ The real Iron Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a sort of a boiler, which was shaped like a woman on the outside-and lined with spikes.” (36). The obvious assumption to be made of this is that Weary told him about this exchange, meaning that he was possibly there to see it as a child or a teen. This is relevant because that interaction between his parents parallels the
