Slaughterhouse Five: A Warning Against War Essay

It is hard for him to communicate with others and it is a daily challenge to get his voice heard, or respected , as a result. His stuttering can even worsen when he is frustrated and nervous, making it extremely difficult for Billy to express himself in a healthy way. Billy talks about how his stuttering has impacted his life, “.... fuh-fuh-flunked out of college be-be-cause I quit ROTC [ The Reserve Officers' Training Corps]. I c-couldn't take it. Wh-wh-wh-whenever the officer in charge of class would call Bibbit, I couldn't answer” (pg112). Billy has then, faced multiple obstacles in his life, in this quote the reader can see how it even held him back from joining the Army, and when looked at the situation as a whole, if Billy had joined the Army, it could've kept him out of the psychiatric ward, giving him more self fulfillment, plus purpose, within his life. When Billy says this, Nurse Ratched is also trying to get to the origin of Billy's stuttering, since is mainly stems from his nerves, she starts trying to find when his stuttering first began. Billy afterwards, begins trying to tell a story of a girl he once loved, in which when he tried proposing to her, he end up stuttering and caused the girl to laugh at him. His stutter has therefore, caused Billy to be unable to fulfill his dreams, lead to heartbreak, and has caused him to be ridiculed by

Where innumerous catastrophic events are simultaneously occurring and altering the mental capability of its viewers eternally, war is senseless killing. The participants of war that are ‘fortunate’ enough to survive become emotionally distraught civilians. Regardless of the age of the people entering war, unless one obtains the mental capacity to witness numerous deaths and stay unaffected, he or she is not equipped to enter war. Kurt Vonnegut portrays the horrors of war in Slaughterhouse Five, through the utilization of satire, symbolism, and imagery.

In order to illustrate the devastating affects of war, Kurt Vonnegut afflicted Billy Pilgrim with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which caused him to become “unstuck in time” in the novel. Billy Pilgrim illustrates many symptoms of PTSD throughout the story. Vonnegut uses these Slaughterhouse Five negative examples to illustrate the horrible and devastating examples of war. The examples from the book are parallel to real life experiences of war veterans, including Vonnegut’s, and culminate in a very effective anti-war novel.

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

War is a tragic experience that can motivate people to do many things. Many people have been inspired to write stories, poems, or songs about war. Many of these examples tend to reflect feelings against war. Kurt Vonnegut is no different and his experience with war inspired him to write a series of novels starting with Slaughter-House Five. It is a unique novel expressing Vonnegut's feelings about war. These strong feeling can be seen in the similarities between characters, information about the Tralfamadorians, dark humor, and the structure of the novel.

Tim O’Brien expresses the theme ‘Fear can be expressed in many different ways’ in his story by having his characters Paul Berlin, and Buffalo (Toby), explain how Billy Watkins died. This allowed us to know the reaction of main character Private Paul Berlin who was amused by the situation simply because he was afraid of the same fate. O’Brien used Paul Berlin, irony, and setting to give a feeling of resemblances in the story, along with opposites. Paul Berlin was played to be the main character of Tim O’Brien’s “Where Have You Gone Charming Billy?,” giving you an idea of what he was feeling throughout the entire writing. He was new to war, it was obvious he was nervous and afraid, and that’s what lead to the theme.

Vonnegut uses literary devices throughout the novel to reveal the reality of war and how it is different than what is shown on the media. People are brainwashed by the media that soldiers are supposed to be clean, charming and attractive but those expectations are not accurate. When Billy went to war he was shocked by his appearance,“ He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a flighty flamingo” (Vonnegut 33). In this quote Vonnegut uses satire to reveal the realization of Billy when he found out that he was not able to reach the standard of the “attractive” soldier.

Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five is a compelling story of war effects on the human mind. Vonnegut's experiences cause him to become an alcoholic and unable to sleep at night due to the guilt of surviving WW2 and Dresden. Vonnegut's shattered self from the war transfer to creating Billy’s apathetic nature. Through the non-linear way of presentation and Vonnegut's insertion of himself inside the book, Vonnegut creates an illusion of reality inside the fictitious world of Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut emphasizes the jump between reality and fiction, highlighting the parallels between war effects on Vonnegut's life and Billy's state of mind due to the injustices of war.

But in order to go back to that time period, Billy would have to imagine Adam and Eve-the only time when war did not seem to be part of the human nature. Similar to horses, thousands of people during war simply obey orders to their own demise without every questioning their actions. Both horses and humans are deprived of free will. Also when the horses die and Billy cries, it showcases his emotional struggles. While most people have been physically affected during the war, many others have been destroyed emotionally. The flames of the fire are being personified as hungry beasts. As the fire is spreading rapidly it is engulfing everything in its path leaving nothing behind. War has the same effect by disrupting every component of a person’s life. By comparing the aftermaths of Dresden to the moon, Vonnegut emphasizes that nothing was remaining except for the minerals that are also found on the moon. The destruction was so severe that it left the land devoid of any beauty and humans. The phrase above describes the awful smell of the liquefied bodies in Dresden. The sweet,beautiful smell of the rose juxtaposes with the acrid smell of the mustard

When he tells Billy that he needs to figure it out and snap out of it, Billy says, “ You guys go on without me. I’m all right” (Vonnegut 47). This just displays the hopelessness in Billy’s life. The war has driven him to lose touch with himself and not value his own life. This makes it very easy for a reader to feel empathy for Billy and get an idea of how war can really affect these men. Billy isn’t the only character that Vonnegut uses to depict the terrors of war.

Satire is an important part of postmodernism and it is one of the most prominent aspects of Vonnegut’s novels, with his humor manifesting itself as a form of black humor. With his very dark sense of humor, Vonnegut confronts many of the negative aspects of the world and describes them in such a way that it disarms and desensitizes the reader to the shock of what they are reading. Slaughterhouse-Five is an excellent example of this. When describing the shock and horror that Billy witnessed during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut takes the time to describe “Weary and Wild Bob and Rumfoord,” characters who “find glory in wholesale death and destruction” (Cox 272). In writing his response to the horrors of war, Vonnegut takes the approach that it is better to make the reader laugh at something and have them slowly realize the horror of what they have read, as opposed to immediately shocking the reader by presenting gory details of his experiences in Dresden. Even the name of his main character is subtle black humor. Billy Pilgrim, whose name is “a reference to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and connotes that Vonnegut’s pilgrim is an average joe burdened with a life of agony and terror” (F1). His name is also in reference to Vonnegut’s feeling that the Second World War was a war fought by mere children, hence the book’s subtitle The Children’s Crusade. The idea of young men who were no more than children in essence when they were sent off to fight and die in a foreign land is a distressing and horrible idea for many people to think about. Yet through his humor Vonnegut forces the reader to come to terms with this, but in a way that eases a reader into the darkness of the novel instead of running into it head on. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut does not limit his black humor to the topic of war, but also opens up criticisms of society as he sees it. Through the Tralfamadorian aliens that kidnap Billy and take him captive on their planet and the science fiction of Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut uses his humor in regards to a variety of topics not related to war. Once such example of Trout’s novels that are throughout the story is “The Gospel from Outer Space in which a visitor from outer space studied

“War is never a solution; it’s an aggravation”- Benjamin Disraeli. This quote represents how the effects of war isn’t a positive reaction, for it causes others to feel hate, fear, and anger. Kurt Vonnegut expresses his thoughts and experiences during World War Two and through the witnessing of the Dresden firebombing to show the reasons for the main character Billy’s actions. Billy Pilgrim has suffered from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) which was caused by the negative experiences he faced during war. This disorder came about from this hate, fear, and anger he went through during this harsh time in war, and by time traveling through the past, present, and future, Billy finds a way to feel joyful by making a positive world in his mind that is the direct opposite of what he experienced in war. He visits a planet that is in his mind called Tralfamadore with tralfamadorians which help him not think about the negative effects of war but to think about something other that. In the novel Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut, his scattered and unorganized structure is used to portray the theme of a man’s instability to cope with horror through imagery and vivid details to show how war has affected the characters represented which makes it a good anti-war novel.

In Slaughterhouse-Five the image portrayed of Billy being a fool raises questions of the difference between reality and illusion. His absurd statures, makes the readers question their own assumptions of soldiers in war, and therefore question war itself. The character of Billy is ridiculed from the beginning of the book, till the end, he is a sort of anti-hero. As a child Billy was funny looking and the book indicates that he grew to continue being the same way, “A spindly scarecrow over six feet in height”. Furthermore, calling him Billy which is short for William shows that he has never grown and is still just a child fighting a war, an absurd soldier, for an absurd war.

Billy wanted to publicize Dresden, “...it wasn't a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance...there hadn't been much publicity” (17). Billy wants to write a book to discourage the making of future wars where the same thing that happened to him will happen to other kids. Billy wants to reveal the true side of war and not the fake one shown on the media. Dresden was one of the worst bombings of World War II and killed 13,5000 civilians. It was not a military base of any kind and Vonnegut describes it as a massacre. Vonnegut expresses his pacifist ideas through Billy. The reader realizes that Billy is a traumatized individual when he commits himself in the mental ward. Billy knew that he was losing his mind, “Billy had committed himself in the middle of his final year...nobody else suspected that he was going crazy. They [the doctors] didn't think it had anything to do with war”

Billy is described as the handsome innocent sailor that is has an innocent outlook on the world. He has no experience in pain, suffering or facing the kind of evil that most would be familiar with. Billy is compered to Adam before God had threw him out of heaven, he is described to be almost flawless, the only flaw he has would be a stutter that become highlighted when he is under emotional stress. Before he was taken on to the Indomitable, on his pervious ship he was known as the peace