War: armed and hostile conflict between different groups with contrasting points of view. While this simple definition may be acceptable to Merriam-Webster, war is a very controversial and complicated topic. Limiting war to the scope of a single definition would reduce the severity and complexity of the issue. Men and women engaged in combat often return home carrying with them a burden of pain and anguish. Gruesome images of death or torture may be seared into the minds of these soldiers along with the guilty conscience that may have accompanied their actions during the war. Learning how to cope with these stresses can be extremely difficult. This is the case of Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five. Following a plane crash, Billy claims to have traveled to Tralfamadore, a planet far, far away from Earth. The Tralfamadorians teach Billy that free will is only a figment of the human imagination. Even in fiction, encountering little green aliens seems pretty far-fetched, so did Billy really venture back in time to see these creatures? No. Billy's exploits with the Tralfamadorians were all in his mind. Due to brain damage, post-traumatic stress from the war, and reading a lot of science fiction novels, Billy has confused his dreams and coping mechanisms with reality. Throughout the book, Billy presumably time travels to various points in his timeline. Although many authors have written about time travel since H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, no time travel actually occurs in Slaughterhouse Five. In the world of Billy Pilgrim, Kilgore Trout wrote extensively about time travel. In fact, Kilgore Trout was "Billy's favorite living author and science fiction became the only kind of stories [Billy] could read"... middle of paper... a former soldier with symptoms of post-stress disorder -traumatic, an explanation for why war has to happen. Perhaps Vonnegut included these stories to paint a picture of how war takes the human out of humanity. Perhaps the Tralfamdorians had the function of encouraging people not to focus on the evil in the world. Could they have been used to demonstrate that there is nothing that actually exists to help soldiers cope with war? Maybe the only way to cope is to imagine something bigger, something beyond human perception, because there's nothing intelligible to say about the massacre, is there? Nothing but the songs of modern dinosaurs. “Poo-tee-weet?” Works Cited Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-five, or the children's crusade: a dance of duty with death. New York, NY: Dell, 1991. Print.Staff, Mayo Clinic. "Definition." Mayo Clinic. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 8 April 2011. Web. 28 November. 2013.