Chapter 2- Foil Characters (Roland Weary and Billy Pilgrim)

Think of a stereotypical, middle-school bully. Does a chubby, fumbling, power-hungry fool come to mind? A boy, calling himself a man, who has been put down so frequently in his own experiences that he has nursed an addiction to putting down others? Otherwise known as, Roland Weary.

Who is the bully's victim? The scrawny boy...the boy who lacks both the desire and physical strength to "save himself" or simply get out of the bully's path of insult. The weak, awkward boy, a.k.a. Billy Pilgrim.

While Weary and Pilgrim's relationship behind the newly-constructed German lines is more complex than a elementary bully and his victim, the two form a hearty example of foil characters in The Slaughterhouse Five. Roland Weary,  "was at the end of an unhappy childhood" and "had been unpopular because he was stupid and fat and mean, and smelled like bacon no matter how much he washed" (Vonnegut 35). He has been "ditched" numerous times in his life and he responds to the despicable feeling of abandonment by "finding somebody who was even more unpopular than himself...and then he would find some pretext for beating the shit out of him" (Vonnegut 35). In stark contrast, Billy Pilgrim is a weak, funny-looking boy of 21 years, who has been caught as an American chaplain's assistant behind German lines. His civilian shoes full of snow and body freezing under his lack of a real military uniform, he gave up his desire to live. He was a "Joe College," an optometry student in a small town and anything but a soldier or a valiant survivor. The only reason, ironically, that he survived the forests was the shoving and abuse from Weary to get him to continue walking. Weary is aggressive and wishes to be a colonel, so much so that he keeps a hidden whistle and attempts to give orders to his pitiful regiment of four men. Pilgrim is lonely and fragile, and has no desire to even continue with his life, which makes him easily submissive to the constant verbal and physical abuse of Weary. While Weary was determined to reach camp, make up for his unimportant life, and receive glory with the "Three Musketeers" and for saving Pilgrim, Billy Pilgrim put no effort in for his own survival and at times wished to be left behind as he entered into the insanity of being "unstuck in time" and feeling the onset of near death. Being foil characters, the two conflict and consequently leave noisy and conspicuous trails, easy for German soldiers to find.