Freytag's Slaughterhouse-Five Essay

The maneuvering of time in Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is no doubt far from usual, but Vonnegut’s writing style allows for a better understanding of the events and their sporadic timeline. In Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut’s manipulation of time contributes to the effectiveness of the work as a whole because it allows him to effortlessly transition between life and death, create a deeper impact on the reader for different events, and allows an understanding of the fluctuating settings throughout the novel.

SlaughterHouse-Five is a book about a man named Billy Pilgrim who is stuck in time, and constantly travels throughout different events in his life. Billy accepts different values and sees traumatic and morbid events differently than others. Billy accepts a way of life that is not perceivable to other humans. Many would argue that Billy’s experiences make him insane, but Billy’s experiences with the Tralfamadorians actually allows him to preserve his sanity, and stay a very intelligent man.

Slaughterhouse-Five book is antiwar novel, and it written by Kurt Vonnegut. A man named Billy Pilgrim who is unstuck in time, and always goes all relives various occasions throughout his life. Billy pilgrim is a main character in this book. “Billy is born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. He grows into a weak and awkward young man, studying briefly at the Ilium School of Optometry briefly before he is drafted” (Borey 1). Then, after training he sent to the Germany during the war. Billy acknowledges diverse values and sees horrible and morbid occasions in a different contrast to others. Billy experiences acknowledges a lifestyle that is not visible to other people. Many readers would contend that Billy's encounters make him crazy; however,

Vonnegut calls upon his personal experiences to create his breakthrough work, Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut expresses his own feeling on war, family, and free will through the non-linear narrative of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. His experience as a soldier and death within his family are mirrored into Pilgrim’s character.

Again, Matheson points out the problem immediately by saying, “the first… [problem] is encountered in the unusual opening chapter where Vonnegut, apparently speaking as himself, gives an account of the novel’s genesis that cannot help but strike us initially as being carelessly written”(Matheson 1). Matheson is not fond of Vonnegut’s work, he not only dislikes the fact that there is not a single meaning to the book, but also the creative and eccentric style Vonnegut used in writing Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five is semi-autobiographical; the first and the last chapters are written in first person, and there are many similarities between Vonnegut’s life, and Billy Pilgrim’s life. In the first chapter Vonnegut identifies himself as the author when he is speaking to his friend on the phone by saying, “‘Listen— ’I said, ‘I’m writing this book about Dresden’”(Vonnegut 4). Critics seem to dislike the use of first person and the identification of the author because it is “irrelevant…[and leads] nowhere”(Matheson 1). The first person point of view comes back in the last chapter when Vonnegut says, “Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago”(Vonnegut 210). Vonnegut uses first person not to be annoying to critics, but to remind the reader that he experienced all of the events in his book, “more or less”(Vonnegut

“Fate is a misconception, it's only a cover-up for the fact you don't have control over your own life.” –Anonymous. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-five, an optometrist named Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time uncontrollably and constantly travels between his past, present, and future. Since Pilgrim is unable to control his time warps, he is forced to re-live agonizing moments such as watching his wartime friend Edgar Derby executed for stealing or going through the Dresden bombing repeatedly. However, he is also able to visit pleasant moments like speaking as president in front of the Lions club or his honeymoon with his wife, Valencia. Vonnegut’s use of repetition and vision of war, time and death are crucial to Pilgrim as he

Regardless of the angle in which Slaughterhouse-Five is approached, there is no escaping the destructive properties of warfare the book entails. The novel chronicles Billy Pilgrim, a New York man who has become “unstuck in time.” As a result, the narrative is structured in sections, jumping back and forth through time and space. Billy begins the novel a boy, already dealing with the perils of life from the bottom of a swimming pool. He grows to become a rather awkward and unattractive adolescent who enrolls in an Optometry school only to be drafted into the army during World War II. A weak youth, his battle skills land him a prisoner of war behind German lines. Throw in a nervous breakdown, morphine, brutal living conditions, and the

We all wish we could travel through time, going back to correct our stupid mistakes or zooming ahead to see the future. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, however, time travel does not seem so helpful. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's main character, has come unstuck in time. He bounces back and forth between his past, present, and future lives in a roller coaster time trip that proves both senseless and numbing. Examining Billy's time traveling, his life on Tralfamadore, and the novel's schizophrenic structure shows that time travel is actually a metaphor for our human tendency to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of death.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s message is, people are more worried about time, and have more of an obsession with chronological order, that they sometimes forget to embrace the highlights. The illusion of chronological time is a key theme in Vonnegut’s novel because it gives prime examples and scenarios where chronological time is important to the characters.

Slaughterhouse-Five has two narrators, an impersonal one and a personal one, resulting in a novel not only about Dresden but also about the actual act of writing a novel - in this case a novel about an event that has shaped the author profoundly. The novel's themes of cruelty, innocence, free will, regeneration, survival, time, and war recur throughout Vonnegut's novels, as do some of his characters, which are typically caricatures of ideas with little depth. Another mainstay is his use of historical and fictional sources, and yet another is his preference for description over dialogue. These aspects of Vonnegut's literary style make the adaptation of Vonnegut to the screen all the more difficult. Ironically, many Vonnegut novels flow with a cinematic fluidity. As described in Film Comment, "Vonnegut's literary vocabulary has included the printed page equivalents of jump-cuts, montages, fades, and flashbacks.

While never a defeatist, Billy merely flows through his disjointed life without much heed to the event at hand. Billy realizes that he holds the power to create his own happiness and satisfaction out of life through appreciation of the present moment rather than contemplate the occurrence of past and future. Vonnegut develops Billy Pilgrim as a unique protagonist as a means of forcing the reader to question the application of free will upon society and gain a new perspective on the beauty of the present.

Slaughterhouse Five is a novel that follows the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has “come unstuck in time” and who was also captured in the Battle of the Bulge, taken prisoner by the Germans, and kept in a slaughterhouse during the Dresden bombings. Once Billy is unstuck in time he is able to see his life events out of order in a third person perspective. He is able to realize his purpose in life and realize his mistakes he made along the way through this process. Billy along with the reader realizes the connections Vonnegut makes to humanity power and language while on this journey. Although Billy is experiencing his life out of order the book is still very logical in the sense that Vonnegut puts the pieces to his life's purpose in the order he is seeing his life.

Kurt Vonnegut is the author of the book Slaughterhouse Five. Of course it was controversial, and still is. The first chapter addresses the conflicts of creating such a novel in the first chapter of the book. In the book Harrison Starr questioned Vonnegut asking if his book were to be a war book. Vonnegut said it was and Starr “Why don’t you make an anti-glacier book instead?” (4). Vonnegut believed what Starr meant by that was wars, like glaciers, are as unpredictable and unstoppable. (4). As one gets farther into the book it completely changed dynamics. The novel then goes into the story of Billy Pilgrim instead of the autobiographical view from the first chapter. The three main literary elements in which will be focusing on analysing is theme,

Slaughterhouse-five strives to remember the tragedy of the bombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut constructs his novel around a main character who becomes “unstuck in time” (23). Billy Pilgrim’s life is told out of order, which gives him a different perspective than the rest of the world. Billy lives through his memories, and revisits events in his life at random times and without warning. Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim to the Tralfamadorian way of thinking about memory and time so that he can cope with being unstuck in time. The Tralfamadorian ideology is set up as an alternative to the human ideology of life. In the novel Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut constructs a reality where memory is unproductive through the Tralfamadorian

Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel written by Kurt Vonnegut, tells the story of the devastating effects of war on a man, Billy Pilgrim, who joins the army fight in World War II. The semi-autobiographical novel sheds light on one of history’s most tragic, yet rarely spoken of events, the 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany.