Billy Pilgrim is a professedly obvious passive character. He doesn't seem to have the emotions or reactions we would often expect from the main character of a war novel.
There are many places throughout the duration of Slaughterhouse-five where Billy shows us, the readers, how detached of a character he really is. The detachment could be a useful tool to focus more on the story, or distracting and irritating to the reader.
Billy explains to the Tralfamadorians how being in a zoo made him feel "about as happy as [he] was on Earth" (114), which obviously doesn't say much about his joy of life on earth. He gives constant examples of how he "really didn't like life at all" (102) during his war experience. It wasn't uncommon for him to be miserable in the war. He mentioned that he "wanted to quit" and had the guys "go on without [him]" (34) multiple times.
Is Billy's underwhelming personality helping the story or alluding from it? If you could, would you change Billy Pilgrim's personality to make it more relatable? What was Vonnegut thinking when he made a character like this?
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