Kurt Vonnegut Research Paper

“A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guars. There was a firestorm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.” (Vonnegut 177).

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.

Many writers in history have written science fiction novels and had great success with them, but only a few have been as enduring over time as Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five is a personal novel which draws upon Vonnegut's experience's as a scout in World War Two, his capture and becoming a prisoner of war, and his witnessing of the fire bombing of Dresden in February of 1945 (the greatest man-caused massacre in history). The novel is about the life and times of a World War Two veteran named Billy Pilgrim. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut uses structure and point of view to portray the theme that time is relative.

The design of this novel was structured from Kurt Vonnegut’s own World War II experiences. The one experience that seemed to stand out the most in the novel was the Dresden air raids. Vonnegut saw the air raids as senseless, so every time Vonnegut is describing the raids in the novel we see a distinct pattern, Vonnegut uses his novel to depict to the reader a feel of senselessness every time the bombing is mentioned. As a witness to the destruction, Billy confronts fundamental questions about the meanings of life and death. Traumatized by the events in Dresden, Billy is still left lost with no answers. Although his life as a working family man is considerably satisfying, he is unable to find peace of mind because of the trauma he suffered in Dresden. (Vonnegut,

When British and American forces raided the city with firebombs, Vonnegut and his fellow captives were saved due to their underground imprisonment. The bombing killed more than 135,000 people, most of whom were innocent civilians, more than the deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. After the bombing, Vonnegut was given the morbid task of carrying the corpses from Air-Raid shelters, including women, children, and the elderly; dead from concussions, fire, or suffocation. In a letter to his father, Vonnegut described his job and the reaction of the locals, “Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge pyres in the city,” (Boomhower). His distressing internment in Dresden not only furthered his anti-war sentiments, but also established a reoccurring theme in his books: the irrationality of government and the senselessness of war. Vonnegut saw the bombing of Dresden and the slaughter of innocents as wasteful and meaningless. He could not comprehend the purpose of destroying a “beautiful” and fully functional civilization (Wiswell 5). The annihilation of the city and lives of the innocent affirmed his views of war as a waste, and even lead to his feeling that, “civilization ended in World War I” (Vitale). This view indicated Vonnegut believed World War II was a meaningless act committed by the uncivilized.

When Vonnegut was a junior studying biochemistry at Cornell he enlisted into the 106th infantry division of the United States army. There he was shipped overseas to fight during World War Two in 1944 and was captured by the German army in the Battle of the Bulge before the end of that year (Farrell n.p.) Vonnegut spent the following months as a prisoner of war, being transported

On December 14, 1944, Vonnegut would be captured in the Battle of the Bulge by German soldiers. He was held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, a German city with no major industries or military presence. The bombing of Dresden was unexpected and Vonnegut and the other Prisoners of War were the only survivors after they escaped. They waited out the bombing in a meat cellar deep under the house where they were keep.

Kurt Vonnegut, arguably the greatest American writer of the mid-1900’s, had experienced a variety of difficult events in his life that he incorporated into his writing, which made his work very unique and personalized. Although he doesn’t always explicitly explain his specific experiences in his short stories, he portrays them through his impactful style of writing. In 1944, Vonnegut was enlisted into the army and sent to Dresden, Germany, where he was later captured as a prisoner of war. While there, he watched the city become destroyed by an Allied bombing and was in utter disbelief. He states, “The destruction of Dresden was my first experience with really fantastic waste... To burn down a habitable city and a beautiful one at that. I was

The story is recounted in a nonlinear fashion, with Billy shifting into different periods of his life, starting from the Battle of the Bulge and into different eras of Billy's life, both future, and past. The climax of the story is when Billy witnessed the utter obliteration of Dresden during World War II after the Nazis apprehend Billy and transported him to Dresden to work inside of a slaughterhouse. There are several intertextually connected characters, for example, both Eliot Rosewater, and Kilgore Trout appeared in other novels written by Kurt Vonnegut, such as Breakfast of Champions, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. There are several different elements of recurring theme in all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, such as the subject of war, free-will, and truth. Slaughterhouse Five strongly focuses on the nature of war, which is the prompt addressed by this

The novel Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut is a unique look at the bombing in Dresden, Germany that occurred at the end of World War II. In February of 1945, approximately 130,000 people were killed in an air attack during an area bombing that lasted several days. According to History. com, “An important aspect of the Allied air war against Germany involved what is known as “area” or “saturation” bombing. In area bombing, all enemy industry–not just war munitions–is targeted, and civilian portions of cities are obliterated along with troop areas.” (History.com staff 1) Vonnegut wrote about the bombing using science fiction and time travel so his main character, Billy Pilgrim, could

The novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut revolves around the firebombing of Dresden that killed an estimated 135,000 civilians. The annihilation of the city’s population leaves the main character, Billy Pilgrim, feeling hopeless and alone, and this eventually leads to his mental breakdown. Vonnegut exposes the horrors of war through the deterioration of Billy’s sanity and the destruction of the entire city of Dresden.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was an author of contemporary American literature who was a prisoner of the German Army. As a witness of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, killing over thirty-five thousands people, he wrote the anti-war book known as Slaughterhouse-five. “He writes about the most excruciatingly painful things. In doing so, his science-fiction heritage is clear, but his purposes are very different: he is nearly always talking about the past, not the future. And as he proceeds, from his anesthetic framework, to clean the shit off, we are able to cheer him

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis Indiana. Kurt Vonnegut, his sister Alice and brother Bernard were fourth-generation Germans, and were never exposed to their heritage because of the anti-German attitude that spread in the U.S. after WW1. Vonneguts lost most of their wealth from the Great Depression. Vonnegut’s father Kurt Vonnegut Sr. fell into severe depression, and his mother Edith Lieber overdosed on sleeping pills and died the night before Mother’s Day.

onnegut writes in his own voice, introducing his experience of the firebombing of Dresden, in eastern Germany, during World War II while he was a prisoner of war and his attempt for many years to complete a book on the subject. He begins with the claim that most of what follows is true, particularly the parts about

Shortly after joining the military he was captured and became a prisoner of war. He survived the Dresden bombing because he was being held as a prisoner in a slaughterhouse meat locker sixty-feet underground. Afterward, he had the responsibility of picking up the burned remains of dead people. Vonnegut was very familiar with the horrors of war giving him a point of view and reason to write the short story “Report on the Barnhouse Effect.”