Psychological Impacts of War based off Slaughterhouse-5

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Psychological Impacts of War
The effects of war are widely spread and can be either short or long term. In most cases, women and children suffer most during a fight while the soldiers experience different impacts from the civilians. Postwar effects have been seen to have adverse effects on the emotions and psychology of the victims. Some of the effects of war include loss of lives, destruction of property and cities which bears long-term impacts on the country’s economy. This paper explores the effects of the war in the slaughterhouse –five which were associated with the psychology of the victims.
Postwar Impacts of Slaughterhouse-Five
The novel slaughterhouse focuses on the life of Billy Pilgrim whose critical stages of his life are highlighted. The steps are before World War II, during the war, and after the war. The primary purpose of the author here does not say that war is wrong but instead highlights the impacts of war on the soldiers who fight in these wars (Wicks & Amanda, 338). Soldiers in many cases, work with the aim of “defending the country” and its people but end up suffering. Vonnegut utilizes Billy’s life to illustrate how war affects the lives of all soldiers.
Billy was a young unmarried infantry for the army in the United States during the world war II. A significant event occurred to him on two nights of February. He had been detained by the Nazi and was living under the “slaughterhouse in Dresden” Germany.

In the two days 13th and 14th of February 1945, there was bombing in Dresden by the Allied air forces which led to the loss of 135000-250000 lives. Dresden was an industrial city and had not experienced such war before. Luckily, among the people who survived, Billy was included.
After the war, Billy’s life became ruined, and he could not think of any happy moment without flashbacking on the war occurrences. He felt guilty, feeling that he was among the few lucky people to survive. For many years’ thoughts about how he appeared among the ones who survived disturbed him and affected his psychological wellbeing (Wicks & Amanda,331). Another thing that affected him was the issue that he was “kidnapped by traflamadorians” who were advanced both technologically and mentally. However, the abduction provided an escape from the guilt that was stuck in his heart whereby he was able to come up with a new world to facilitate his survival and undervalue the gift of life and death cruelty.       
Conclusion
The primary impact of war here was that Billy lost his mind because he was unable to bear reality facts. He, therefore, took an initiative of creating a new real world that he could handle. He utilized the traflamadorians to make his life easy as a strategy to do away with his guilt. In his novel, Vonnegut makes the reader despise war by illustrating its impacts on the lives of people involved. He makes the reader understand how war affects the soldiers even when they are not on duty.
Works Cited
Wicks, Amanda. “All This Happened, More or Less”: The Science Fiction of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55.3 (2014): 329-340.