slaughter house five

Aliens.
I found Vonneguts use of the aliens to be very creative and well integrated. The use of the Traflamadorians and their planet demonstrates to me how war can not only cause elaborate delusions in people but also, and I say this in the context of Vonneguts cognition, can emancipate or alleviate the problem of time that death can cause a person to face. In war you cannot escape the consuming thought of impending death; the awareness that it could come in any form and at any time existing concurrently with destruction, pain, and malevolence all caused by humanity would cause, to say the least, agonizing insight. In chapter two we get a sense of who Pilgrim is with the scene of him being fired upon by an unseen foe and standing still after the first shot waiting for a second to be fired upon him. Was this helpless gesture by Pilgrim along with the scene in the woods, where he first is confronted with an estrangment from time itself, caused by the dilemmas of war or is he just inhuman? Not necessarily in the sense of detached malic but rather non-human. As stated in the book he never gets mad and as seen through the second chapter he displays no "normal" human reactions to situations in war but then again it could be argued that there are no normal reactions while being in war. Even the aliens could be played into the idea of an inhuman quality about Billy Pilgrim. Either way it I found the introduction of the aliens and their planet to be a very bright and creative format to present the conlifctions of war.