Vonnegut: On the Verge of Losing His Mind

Like I said in one of my previous blog posts, most of the story unfolds around mocking war. Therefore, my feelings towards the following excerpt are unclear:

"Billy wondered if there was a telephone somewhere. He wanted to call his mother, to tell her he was alive and well."

Billy wants to let his mother know he is well, that he has been surviving the concentration camps. Anyone would with all the comodities the Englishmen gave them. Ironically, Billy has dodged death many times, even thought it´s constantly right around the corner (bombs, starvation, climate, etc). Billy says he´d like to talk with his mother and tell her something, and this may be due to the thought that Billy was based on Vonnegut´s life. When he was young, Vonnegut´s mother committed suicide and the lack of a maternal figure probably influenced how Billy acts with his own mother in the novel. He seems scared to confront her, fearing letting her down and unable to express himself to her. Mrs. Pilgrim is presented as a lovely person, and her conversations with Rosewater expose these traits.

Children who lose a parent tend to have three times the risk of depression than those with two living parents, as well as an increase in the risk for post-traumatic stress disorder. These issues combined with surviving war probably made Vonnegut a ticking psycho machine.