George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse Five

War is the third topic that is heavily satirized in Slaughterhouse Five. First, Billy almost gets killed because he is time-traveling. Second of all, Vonnegut always says “so it goes” (12) whenever someone dies, so it sort of mocks death. Also, he is given a woman’s jacket when he becomes a POW and it mocks his position in the war also. On the nights of February 13-14 in 1944 the city of Dresden, Germany was subjected to one of the worst air attacks in the history of man. By the end of the bombing 135,000 to 250,000 people had been killed by the combined forces of the United States and the United Kingdom. Dresden was different then Berlin or many of the other military targets which were attacked during World War II because it was never fortified or used for strategic purposes and, therefore, was not considered a military target. At one point, Billy watches a war movie about WWII. He watches it regularly, showing how reality is.

In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut uses short phrases such as “so it goes” in order to show the idea that Billy, the main character, doesn’t really have pity toward died people. This is because when Billy visited the Tralfamadorians the “important he learned on The Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral”. ( Vonnegut 26). Billy finds his own explanation of the bombing and the death of so many innocent people. He turns to the Tralfamadorian belief that the deaths were unpreventable and had to happen because that was how they were supposed to happen. Neither he nor anyone else could change what destiny had decided would occur. At the thought of these deaths and all death Billy sees, he has only one

Many people returned from World War II with disturbing images forever stuck in their heads. Others returned and went crazy due to the many hardships and terrors faced. The protagonist in Slaughter-House Five, Billy Pilgrim, has to deal with some of these things along with many other complications in his life. Slaughter House Five (1968), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is an anti-war novel about a man’s life before, after and during the time he spent fighting in World War II. While Billy is trying to escape from behind enemy lines, he is captured and imprisoned in a German slaughterhouse. The author tells of Billy’s terrible experiences there. After the war, Billy marries and goes to school to

The anti-war message is upheld further with the ironies that Vonnegut provides in the book. One example is "when one of the soldiers, a POW, survives the fire-bombing, but dies afterward from the dry heaves because he has to bury dead bodies" (Vit). When Billy and one of his comrades join to other scouts the Vonnegut portrays as well trained, Vonnegut displays irony by killing the skillful scouts and allows the less competent Pilgrim and Roland to survive. Roland does eventually die because he is forced to walk around in wooden clogs that turn his feet to pudding. The greatest example of irony is seen in what Vonnegut claims to be the climax of the story. He explains the situation before the story even begins. He is referring to the:

With this description, Vonnegut vastly distances Billy from the ideal, strong and mighty image of a soldier, yet Billy is a soldier nonetheless. Not only is this weak and ungracious character fighting and representing the honour of his country but also he is one of the few soldiers who survive the war; he outlives many of the other soldiers that could be considered better suited for war. Furthermore, Vonnegut compares Billy to a filthy flamingo, highlighting the distance that exists between society's soldier ideal, graceful and admirable, and the soldiers' reality, harsh and rampageous. In short, Billy is so far from what is expected that he “shouldn't even be in the Army” (51). However, Billy is not the only soldier in this ludicrous predicament. Vonnegut describes the entire Army as chaotic, confused and ludicrous:

“So it goes,” is a phrase that boggled my mind, ever since it was first mentioned in the book. A phrase that can have many different meanings, but yet it is only three words. The phrase “So it goes,” was used after every death, making them all equal. What even shocked me, is that Billy was calm when talking about death. Implying that there was nothing he could do to stop it, and it would happen to the best of us. In my opinion, the phrase “So it goes,” represents the idea that the Tralfamadorians had in which a person may be dead at an instance, but is still alive in the memories of others. It had also represented anti-war beliefs that the author had, because of the bombing of Dresden. At the same time though, the repetition of the phrase keeps a tally of the cumulative force of death throughout the novel, thus pointing out the tragic inevitability of death.

Kurt Vonnegut did a great job in writing an irresistible reading novel in which one is not permitted to laugh, and yet still be a sad book without tears. Slaughterhouse-five was copyrighted in 1969 and is a book about the 1945 firebombing in Dresden which had killed 135,000 people. The main character is Billy Pilgrim, a very young infantry scout who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered to a slaughterhouse where he and other soldiers are held. The rest of the novel is about Billy and his encounters with the war, his wife, his life on earth, and on the planet Tralfamador.

This distortion of war may have been unintentional, but the more voluntary examples of the distortion of war can be seen in the results of war, and how people may react to it. Billy Pilgrim, the main protagonist of the story, survived an air raid by falling asleep in an underground meat locker and was one of the few survivors of the bombings of Dresden, the city that Slaughterhouse Five was located in. “The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden. They were all being killed with their families. So it goes,” (Vonnegut, 83). The phrase, “so it goes” is a neutral statement that Billy Pilgrim uses to himself to cope with the deaths of human beings. Rather than treating death as a sorrowful event, Billy treats death as just another one of the many points in a person’s life, thus distorting how humans normally react to

Throughout the novel the phrase, “So it goes” would constantly reappear following every indication of death. This phrase was originated by the Tralfamadorians, who are aliens from the planet Tralfamadore that look like toilet plungers. After he went to New York City to talk about being unstuck in time and to how he got to the planet of Tralfamadore, he wrote one letter to the Ilium News

The phrase “so it goes” is repeated 106 times in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. From “dead” champagne to the massacre at Dresden, every death in the book is seemingly equalized with the phrase “so it goes”. The continuation of this phrase ties in with the general theme on indifference in the story. If the Tralfamadorian view of time is correct, then everyone is continuously living every moment of their life and dying is not the end. However, if Vonnegut believed in this idea, then he wouldn’t have felt compelled to write about the firebombing of Dresden. It is clear that both Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut are affected by the massacre they saw, but they have different ways of rationalizing it. Billy finds comfort in the Tralfamadorian view of life, whereas Vonnegut disagrees, and urges the reader to disagree too. The constant repetition of “so it goes” breaks the reader away from the Tralfamadorian point of view, and allows them to come to their own conclusion that although it would be nice to forget the bad parts of life, it is important to remember all of the past. Vonnegut helps the reader come to this conclusion by repeating the phrase after gruesome moments, and showing how meaningless life can be if the Tralfamadorian ideas are believed, as seen through Billy Pilgrim’s bland life..

Kurt Vonnegut was a man of disjointed ideas, as is expressed through the eccentric protagonists that dominate his works. Part cynic and part genius, Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliance as a satirist derives from the deranged nature of the atrocities he had witnessed in his life. The reason Vonnegut’s satire is so popular and works so well is because Vonnegut had personal ties to all the elements that he lambasted in his works. Vonnegut’s experience as a soldier in WWII during firebombing of Dresden corrupted his mind and enabled him to express the chaotic reality of war, violence, obsession, sex and government in a raw and personal manner. Through three works specifically, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” “Harrison Bergeron,” and Slaughterhouse-five,

At the time Billy is captured, he becomes “unstuck in time,” and he sees various moments of his life occur. Later, Billy experiences a nervous breakdown so the other prisoners give him a shot of morphine which sends him time-tripping once more. Afterwards, he and the other prisoners are sent to the city of Dresden which remains untouched y the war. Here, they work in an abandoned slaughterhouse which carries the name of “Slaughterhouse Five.” One of the nights of their stay, enemies of the Germans bomb the city to compose a firestorm which consequently incinerates roughly 130,000 people. Billy and his allies manage to survive in an airtight meat locker. When they depart the locker, they are introduced to the wreckage and destruction that is left of the

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut explains his experience of the World War II bombing of Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut's creative antiwar novel shows the audience the hardships of the life of a soldier through his writing technique. Slaughterhouse Five is written circularly, and time travel is ironically the only consistency throughout the book. Vonnegut outlines the life of Billy Pilgrim, whose life and experiences are uncannily similar to those of Vonnegut. In Chapter 1, Kurt Vonnegut non-fictionally describes his intentions for writing the book. Vonnegut personally experienced the destruction of Dresden, and explains how he continuously tried to document Dresden but was unsuccessful for twenty-three years after the war. Vonnegut let

Billy encounters countless atrocities and absurdities in his life and his war experiences that all contribute to his mental withdrawal and deterioration. The horrors of Dresden, including death, senseless cruelty, and absurd injustice, make up the panorama of violence and inhumanity that defines Pilgrim’s world (Broer 70). All of this violence and death around him leads to his descent into schizophrenia and insanity. Billy becomes increasingly crippled by the psychologically damaging blows he receives during the war causing him to withdraw from reality and ultimately lose his sanity (Broer 70). Billy’s prisoner-of-war experience is a nightmare of victimization and madness described as “an acrimonious madrigal, . . . everybody, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep” (Vonnegut 100). Broer states that Billy “and everyone around him exhibit some form of insane, mechanically conditioned behavior, that which is overtly aggressive, or that which allows aggression to happen” (73).

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is not a bad book. I will continue to admit that while the first chapter reminds me of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, the second chapter made up for all the annoyance that had started to accumulate since the beginning. I am going to do my best to make this response journal as coherent as possible, but I will admit that there are some components in this novel that I just cannot find the appropriate words for.