Denial?

Through the course of the novel, it becomes clear that the main character, Billy Pilgrim, is not the author, and neither is the narrator. At times it is difficult to remember that Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut are not the same person. In chapter 5 on page 125, Vonnegut mentions a man who is throwing up, and he says that he has thrown up everything except for his brains. Then follows that up with saying he then throws up his brains. The paragraph is followed up with three simple sentences that really made me think.

"That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." (pg.125)

I began to think, maybe in making up a character for the novel it was a way for Vonnegut to tell his story without actually telling his story. Maybe it was a way of him not having to accept that the horrible things he had seen in Dresden really happened, and were not simply a dream. Witnessing the bombing and the things in the prison camps  must have been so awful that instinctively Vonnegut did not want to remember the things he had seen, much less write a book about them. So instead of writing a book on everything that happened to him, he made it easier for him to write by making Billy Pilgrim the one who went through it all. Vonnegut, in a way, was denying the fact that he was the one who went through the bombing and prison camps.

In Vonnegut's decision to structure the novel like this, it is a way to make people realize that even though Billy is a made up character and some of the events that occur in the novel are not true, that Billy is simply an ordinary person. The events that were mostly true could happen to any person, making the events of the bombing and the prison camps more real to the reader and not just some story read in a book.