Kurt Vonnegut's Tragic Path to Success

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.

In 1945 Kurt Vonnegut witnessed a horrific series of bombings that led to the destruction of the German city of Dresden, where he was taken as a prisoner of war. The controversial fire-storm raid, carried out by bombers of the Royal Air Force and US Air Force, took casualties of up to a quarter million people (Klinkowitz x-xi). As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was forced to participate as a corpse miner in the city's cleanup process. Upon his return from the Second World War, Vonnegut decided to write a book describing his traumatic war experiences. After twenty years of struggling with research, failing to recall personal

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is one of the most well known World War II authors. His humble beginnings and early life misfortunes shaped not only his writings, but also his view of the world. His imprisonment in Dresden in World War II, however, formed his opinions about war at an early age and later inspired many of his works and style of writing. After the returning from World War II, Vonnegut voiced his sentiments through his writing that war was wasteful and uncivilized. Vonnegut developed a unique blend of sadness, satire, and simplicity, along with his ability to understand the audience, which made his novels comprehensible and inspirational to any

Vonnegut then came home, where he continued his college education by attending the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1947. He married Jane Cox in 1945 and eventually fathered three children, their names being Mark, Edith, and Nanette. After the war, he was a Chicago City News Bureau Police Reporter in 1947. Before he became a writer, he also worked with Public Relations for General Electric in Schenectady, New York from 1947 to 1950 (Ethridge 1-4: 970). In 1950, Vonnegut decided to become a writer, with his first novel, Player Piano, being published in 1951. He would later go on to write works such as Canary in a Cat House (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat’s Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973). His most renowned work, Slaughterhouse-Five, is as close to an autobiography as he comes. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes a novel based his experience as a prisoner of war

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 main event in the novel was the fire-bombing on Dresden during World War II, which both Vonnegut and Pilgrim took part of. Billy Pilgrim was constantly traveling back in time to WWII already knowing this tragedy was going to take place. But again, he went on with life because he knew he could not stop the bombing from

Kurt Vonnegut is an American novelist from Indianapolis, Indiana, born in 1922. A very important part of his life was when he served in WWII where he was taken as a prisoner of

Three months following his mother's suicide, Vonnegut was sent to Europe as an intelligence scout with the ill-fated 106th Infantry Division.

     Those who write on the human condition are often philosophers who write with convoluted language that few can understand. Kurt Vonnegut, however, focuses on the same questions, and provides his own personal answers with as much depth as that of the must educated philosopher. He avoids stilted language typical of philosophers, using shorter sentences, less complex vocabulary, humorous tangents, and outrageous stories to get his point across. With this style, Vonnegut presents the age-old question "How do we as humans live in this world?" in a manner appealing and understandable to the less educated mass. When offering advice to writers on how to write, Vonnegut said, "Our audience requires us

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,

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

Kurt Vonnegut’s personal experiences of World War II and the firebombing of Dresden were important factors in determining his writing style and the political and philosophical views that it conveyed. Throughout his works, the overarching message that Vonnegut delivers is the need for love and compassion in a world where humans are helpless against an indifferent fate.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Allen) Indianapolis is the biggest city in Indiana and it got its name from Indiana and the Greek work for city “polis”. In the 2010 Census Indianapolis has a population of 820,445 people. Indianapolis is not well known for producing famous people. David Letterman, a late night TV shows host is one of the most well known people to come from their that is dereliction s still living. Kurt Vonnegut is the most famous person from Indiana. He passed away on April 11,2007 in New York City, New York. His parent’s names were Kurt Sr. his father and Edith his mother. His father was a well-known architect around Indianapolis and his mother came from a wealthy family. Her father was a brewer in Indianapolis. (Allen) They had three children together. The oldest was Bernard,

Chaos is introduced in chapter one where the narrator acknowledges the “jumbled and jangled” (19) nature of the book. By anticipating the novel’s end—“Poo-tee-weet” (22)—even before the story truly begins, Vonnegut collapses the distinction between ‘end’ and ‘beginning’ that govern the notion of ‘order’. Order has failed from the start and any subsequent attempts to search for order is thus doomed to fail. However, despite acknowledging the illogicality of war and the futility of seeking any meaning, the structure of the novel is such that the reader is still continually reminded of the massacre that took place in Dresden. By mentioning it in the opening paragraph of the book and constantly reminding the readers of it throughout the novel, Vonnegut forces the reader to regard the atrocities of the war as a mental ‘present’, instead of ‘past’. This technique reinforces Vonnegut’s message about the horrors and senselessness of war and also makes the point that war, despite being irrational, is not to be