The destructiveness of the war is evoked in subtle ways. For instance, Billy is quite successful after the war: he is the president of the Lions Club, works as a successful optometrist, lives in a comfortable modern home, and has two children. While Billy seems to have led a productive life after the war, these markers of success speak only to its surface. He gets his job not because of any particular skills but as a result of his father-in-law. At one point in the novel, Billy walks in on his son and realizes that they are unfamiliar with each other. Beneath the grandeur of his success lies a man too war-torn to understand it. In fact, Billy’s name is a diminutive form of William which indicates that he is more an immature boy than a man.

Vonnegut, then, produces the science-fiction thread, including the Tralfamadorians, to indicate how greatly the war has disrupted Billy’s existence. It seems that Billy may be hallucinating his experiences with the Tralfamadorians as a way to escape a world destroyed by war, a world that he cannot understand. Furthermore, the Tralfamadorian theory of the fourth dimension seems too a way for Billy to rationalize all the death he has seen. Do you believe Billy made up the Tralfamadorians to cope with the war or did he really get kidnapped by aliens?