Listen:

Billy Pilgrim is now introduced to us in chapter two of Slaughter House Five. I am a little baffled after reading that he has “walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941”(23). Thinking at first that he must just be having flashbacks, after reading that he goes back through another door, and finds himself in 1963, I conclude that you can’t exactly have ‘flashbacks’ into the future. After being walked through Billy’s life, being born in 1922, his “honorable discharge from the Army in 1945” (24), to his promulgation of having become unstuck in time in 1967. I have to come to the same conclusion as his daughter, Barbara, that Billy has gone crazy. The Tralfamadorians completely tipped the scale on whether or not he was sane or not. Plus, after discovering that he was working on a letter in his freezing cold basement wearing pajamas and no socks, I do think he might have been hit a little too hard in the head somewhere during his World War II adventures.
After reading a thought of Billy’s, I wonder truly at how far his imagination has gone. He is struck by the thought “ what a Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time” (31). What is he talking about? Where they really dead?
When we are guided through Billy’s first experiences with the army, I feel bad for his pitiful character. Being bullied by Weary, and having to deal with the cold, and hunger, no wonder Billy has turned out believing he has been abducted by aliens! Then, shockingly, Billy dies and then is swung back into life, only years earlier, first as a baby, before birth, then as a boy in the YMCA with his father.
Really, Billy has only been dreaming, after having passed out from the cold and hunger, and is then shaken awake by Roland Weary, who had come back for him. Billy and Roland then get ditched by the rest of their company, who obviously had put up with their ridiculous actions long enough. Then, the chapter ends with the entrance of Germans, and the question why Billy would laugh while being kicked by Weary. Obviously he has cracked.