Questioning Sanity

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

In the first fourth of the novel, Billy Pilgrim comes off as a man of questionable sanity.  His own daughter believes he is senile and rambles on for hours about aliens from Tralfamadore.  Perhaps within the confines of the novel, these aliens actually exist, but further evidence in chapter five would suggest otherwise.  While with the English officers, who were also German prisoners of war, Billy enjoyed a rendition of Cinderella put on by the Englishmen.  He enjoyed it so much that he laughed hysterically, ultimately sending himself into a state of mania.  After this episode, "Billy was put to bed and tied down, and given a shot of morphine," (Vonnegut 98).  Obviously, his fellow prisoners of war and the Germans thought Billy insane.  Furthermore, while sedated, Billy experienced a flashback which further supports the argument for his lack of sanity.  The flashback was actually an instance of time travelling, but that is another discussion entirely.  Anyway, the flashback brought Billy to the period of time when he "had committed himself in the middle of his final year at the Ilium School of Optometry," (Vonnegut 100).  At that point, Billy thought he was going insane.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, for Billy, "The doctors agreed: he was going crazy," (Vonnegut 100).  While Barbara intimated it earlier, that sentence confirms it: Billy is crazy, at least from another human's perspective.