Throughout the course of the novel, I've found myself feeling very sympathetic for poor Billy Pilgram. He becomes a prisoner of war, witnesses one of the worst firebombings in history, marries a fat women for her money, and gets kidnapped by aliens and deemed insane for telling his story. But worst of all, due to his uncontrolled ability to travel in time, he knows everything both good and bad that is to happen in the future, and has absolutely no power to change it. While at first I was a bit taken back on Billy constantly having no desire to live, given his situation, I don't really blame him. However this begs the question, why would Vonnegut intentionally create this type of protagonist to tell his extremely serious and emotionally dramatic story?
The main reason I believe someone could possibly create Billy's unmotivated and detached persona as a protagonist, is to go against the idea of the traditional war narrative. In the very first chapter, Vonnegut admits he made a promise to Mary O'hare that he wouldn't glorify the horrors of war to inspire the next generation to feel like they need to prove themselves as men in battle in his book. With this promise in mind, Vonnegut seems to do everything in his power to insure Billy can not be seen as a hero. By the end of reading this novel, I believe Vonnegut's desired effect was to not have any reader aspire to be like Billy's character, creating almost an anti-role model. This is especially due given the science-fiction plot twist to the novel with his claims of the Tralfamodore planet, making Billy's life seem even more isolated and sad than ever.
While Vonnegut originally struggles with identifying his novel as an official "anti-war" book, I feel like the message clearly comes across through Billy's persona as a protagonist. By depicting such a sad, childlike, and almost comical figure to share his extremely serious story, Vonnegut is creating a different type of metanarrative that can be argued as more relatable to the actual type of young kid fighting in the war itself at the time.
