Billy Pilgrim (character)

William "Billy" Pilgrim is a fictional character and protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel "Slaughterhouse-Five". He was portrayed by Michael Sacks in the 1972 film adaption of Vonnegut's novel.

Character background

Billy Pilgrim is tall at 6 feet 3 inches, weak, and skinny at around 140 pounds. He is also friendly and kind toward others even though some other people are often rude or vain toward Billy and sometimes start accusations against him. Billy also tries to pass on wife advice or information that the Tralfamadorians had told him such as to not focus on war and instead focus on peace and enjoys moments of happiness.

William Pilgrim, only addressed as Billy, was born in Ilium, New York on November 11, 1922. As a child, Billy had experienced tramatic things that have happened to him that affected him as an adult, such as his father throwing him into the deep end in a public pool when he was six or when he almost felled off the edge of the Grand Canyon when he was seven. Billy graduated from high school in 1940 and after graduating moved into an apartment in Ilium.

In 1943, the 20 year old Billy Pilgrim was drafted into the Army and served as a chaplain's assistant in Virginia. By Summer of 1944, Billy was ordered to serve overseas as a chaplain's assistant on the frontlines in Germany. Billy is taken prisoner of war by Nazi soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge along with another soldier named Roland Weary. After capture, he, Roland Weary, and other recently captured prisoners of war were sent on in a boxcar to a Nazi prisoner of war camp in Luxembourgh. Roland Weary on another boxcar died of gangrene and Roland's insane friend Paul Lazzaro promised to find and kill Billy Pilgrim some years after the war. In January of 1945, Pilgrim and other American prisoners of war are transported to be held at a prisoner of war camp in Dresden. By February, the city of Dresden is constantly being bombarded by American soldiers. Billy Pilgrim, as well as German soldiers and American prisoners of war are hiding and taking refuge in an abandoned slaughterhouse called "Schlachthof Funf", which in English read "Slaughterhouse Five". By May 1945, a week after Germany surrendered Billy and other surviving PoWs were being transported out of Germany and into the United States where Billy had received an honorable discharge from service in July 1945.

A few months after the war ended, Billy was institutionalized and put into psychiatric care recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder. While institutionalized, he met a man named Eliot Rosewater who introduces Billy to science fiction and also introduces Billy to science fiction novels by Kilgore Trout, a failed author who had written 117 novels but had sold less than 100 copies of all his novels combined. Billy would eventually meets Kilgore Trout in 1964 in Ilium and Trout would be invited to Billy and his wife's eighteenth wedding anniversary. Billy remained in the mental hospital for four months until January of 1946. After he was released he married a young heavyset women named Valencia Merble who had come from a very rich family. Valencia's father owned the Ilium School of Optometry and Billy would later attend that school, graduating in 1950. In 1947, Billy and Valencia's first child Robert was born and two years later they had a daughter named Barbara who was born in 1949. After Billy graduated from the Ilium School of Optometry, he lead an upper middle class lifestyle as an optometrist making around 60,000 dollars a year and living in a three stories white house in Ilium.

In 1968, Billy was one of the two survivers of plane crash. While Billy's wife Valencia was driving to the hospital Billy was being treated at, she crashed her car and died of carbon minoxide poising outside the hospital. After Billy got out of the hospital he went to his home in Ilium and was being taken care of by his daughter Barbara because Billy's wife had died and his son was fighting in the Vietnam War with the green berets. That is when Billy is first capture by an alien space ship and is taken to a planet billions of miles away from Earth called Tralfamadore, and is trapped there momentarily and sent back to Earth to relive past or future moments of his life. On Tralfamadore, Billy meets a pornstar (who was also abducted) named Montana Wildhack, who disappeared and is believed to have drowned herself in the Pacific Ocean. She and Billy fall in love and have a child together. Billy tells his daughter Barbara all this but she doesn't believe him and thinks he crazy.

On February 13, 1976, Billy Pilgrim, now 53 years old addressed a speech at a convention in Chicago, Illinois about his expieriences with being abducted by aliens. Billy also tells the crowd that Paul Lazzaro, a man he new during the war was going to murder him. The crowd began to protest and didn't want the killing to take place. Billy's final words were "If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not listened to a word I've said". Billy Pilgrim was then assassinated by Paul Lazzaro.

Film portrait

In the 1972 film adaption of "Slaughterhouse-Five", Billy Pilgrim was portrayed by Michael Sacks.