On character is Werner Gluck, young German guard at the slaughterhouse. Gluck gets his first sight of a nude woman along with Billy. Their common intrigue and attention in the bare female body bonds, these two men from different sides, replicating how essentially human feelings such as longing can outdo differences of political philosophy. Another character is Bernhard O’Hare, A wartime friend of Vonnegut. O’Hare appears when Vonnegut visits him and his wife in Pennsylvania while trying to do research and collect remembrances for his Dresden book. Like his wife, Mary, and Vonnegut himself, O’Hare, a real character, helps open Slaughterhouse Five in reality. Vonnegut has this other …show more content…
The first thing the Germans do when Billy arrives at their prison camp is to make him take off his clothes... which is also the first thing the Tralfamadorians do when Billy arrives on their planet. (These aliens are lewd.) When a German prison guard thumps an American in the face and the American questions why, the German answers, "Vy you? Vy anybody?" (Vonnegut pg. 37). Respectively, the Tralfamadorians reject to accept the question of "why" they abducted Billy: they say, "There is no why" (Vonnegut pg. 68).\
Billy lives a life full of shame and so, perhaps, has no fear of death. He is strange, consequently, to the Tralfamadorian philosophy of accepting death. This fact may point to an interpretation of the Tralfamadorians as a figment of Billy’s troubled mind, an extravagant coping mechanism to explain the devastating slaughter Billy has witnessed. The novel centers on Billy Pilgrim to a degree that rejects the growth of the supporting characters, who exist in the text only as they relate to Billy’s experience of