Reflections of Life on the Page Any great work is, at its heart, a reflection of the artist. One only needs to imagine Vincent van Gogh looking up at the night sky while painting Starry Night, or to picture Leonardo de Vinci staring at Lisa Gherardini to encapsulate the most perfect smile in the Mona Lisa to know this to be true. Even artists who might not directly reveal their influence are still driven by it; Pollock would close his eyes and let his heart guide his brush to create his masterpieces. Even if he was not painting a scene, he was still painting his life. This idea of art reflecting artist is true in all forms of art: movies, comics, music, photography, paintings, but most relevantly in writing. Authors have a medium to …show more content…
Interrupting his education, he was drafted and sent to Germany in service of the United States Army. While there, he would be captured by German troops and sent to Dresden, and held there while the Allies firebombed the city. After Vonnegut was recovered, he was given the Purple Heart and discharged in 1945. That same year he married Jane Marie Cox on September 1, as well as start to attend the University of Chicago, where he would study until 1947. Throughout the course of his professional career, he wrote several novels, as well as four short story collections. His collection of novels included masterpieces such as Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, Hocus Pocus, The Sirens of Titan, Welcome to the Monkey House, and of course, Slaughterhouse Five. Later, he was divorced and remarried in the same year, 1979, this time marrying Jill Krementz, a photographer. The two happily lived in New York city raising a large family of biological and adopted children. During Vonnegut’s life several attempts were made to bring his novels to the silver screen, including an adaption of Slaughterhouse Five in 1972, but it was widely considered a failure. (Werlock) Vonnegut spent almost his entire adult life working for the greater good, “He wrote, did advertisements, and spoke for a humanitarian agenda.” (Morse) While Vonnegut gave multiple responses when asked about religion,
Authors write to be understood and to show others their beliefs. They want to color a picture for you in the words they are writing. John Steinbeck used word choice, parallelism, and foreshadowing in Of Mice and Men in the same way a great artist creates a scene.
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.
Vonnegut includes himself in scenes within Slaughterhouse-Five to portray an “author-as-character” unique style. It is in the tenth chapter when Vonnegut switches points of view to reveal himself as one of the soldiers alongside Billy.
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's comments on the similitudes amongst himself and other writers, particularly the impacts of adolescence and war on composing, alongside the improvement of varying mentalities toward viciousness that drove Vonnegut to separate himself from Hemingway. War in Slaughterhouse-Five is a principally manly exertion, described by misinformed masculinity and bloodthirstiness. Maybe remembering the toxic manly talks of President Johnson, Vonnegut utilizes includes the "post-coital fulfillment" some war lovers get from what is informally known as "wiping up". This helps him as a author because he has the ability to show the direct impacts of the effects of war.
Each Author is unique they write about many different pieces, but they all have this set of principles they go by. Every author thinks about these four main concepts when they write and they are audience, genre, context, purpose. They first think about who will want to read their work so try to establish an audience. The Author next has to determine what their writing will be. They have to decide whether it's science fiction or any other, but they understand it important tell the genre of the work. Authors cannot be all over the place they are focused on one specific tone. Next authors contemplate why to write at all there must be a reason that is true, they all written for a purpose each author has one. Authors often write in troubling times for them like
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
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
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.
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.
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,
The book Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, is an anti-war book about Vonnegut’s exposure to the vivid events that unfolded during his time at the slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany and how it affected him. The story is told by Vonnegut through the perspective of the main protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Billy was a survivor from WWII and the Dresden bombing, but after returning he claims to have traveled through time to explicit memories from life and had been abducted by Tralfamadorians (aliens). However, in the film Slaughterhouse-Five, directed by George Roy Hill, viewers see slight changes to the storyline. Viewers notice that in the opening scene that Vonnegut’s friend Bernard O’Hare and his wife, Mary O’Hare, are never
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
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.