Slaughterhouse-Five By Kurt Vonnegut: An Analysis

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.

People react differently to tragedies: some mourn, some speak up, and some avoid the sorrow. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut suggests the danger and inhumanity of turning away from the discomfort by introducing Billy Pilgrim as someone who is badly affected by the aftermath of the Dresden bombing, and the Tralfamadorians as the aliens who provide an easy solution to Billy. It is simpler to avoid something as tragic as death, but Vonnegut stresses the importance of confronting it. Vonnegut, like many artists, expresses his ideas through his creations. The significance of art is not confined to helping and inspiring the general public; the process of creating art also becomes another form of coping mechanism for artists.

Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut uses Billy Pilgrim to mirror how people cope with trauma and disillusionment. Upon Billy’s return from war, he is diagnosed with PTSD, and eventually creates Tralfamadorians to help him make sense of his world. The aliens teach him to use the phrase, so it goes, whenever he hears of tragedies or death; however, over the course of the novel the maxim transitions from being an anecdote used to accept how the world works into a warning that presages how the world will end.

“Fate is a misconception, it's only a cover-up for the fact you don't have control over your own life.” –Anonymous. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-five, an optometrist named Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time uncontrollably and constantly travels between his past, present, and future. Since Pilgrim is unable to control his time warps, he is forced to re-live agonizing moments such as watching his wartime friend Edgar Derby executed for stealing or going through the Dresden bombing repeatedly. However, he is also able to visit pleasant moments like speaking as president in front of the Lions club or his honeymoon with his wife, Valencia. Vonnegut’s use of repetition and vision of war, time and death are crucial to Pilgrim as he

Slaughterhouse-Five: The Novel and the Movie In 1972 director George Roy Hill released his screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (or The Children's Crusade; A Duty Dance With Death). The film made over 4 million dollars and was touted as an "artistic success" by Vonnegut (Film Comment, 41). In fact, in an interview with Film Comment in 1985, Vonnegut called the film a "flawless translation" of his novel, which can be considered an honest assessment in light of his reviews of other adaptations of his works: Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971) "turned out so abominably" that he asked to have his name removed from it; and he found Slapstick of Another Kind (1984) to be

Billy Pilgrim often retreats into a detached, otherworldly mindset as a coping mechanism. Billy has showcased this nonchalant type of behavior frequently in the book. Through the repeating of "so it goes" and "all this happened more or less," Vonnegut illustrates the theme of detachment in "Slaughterhouse-Five," reflecting on Billy's acceptance of death, the unreliability of memory is caused by Billy's trauma causing blurred lines between reality and fantasy. Billy's claim that "it's very silly for people to cry over anyone's funeral" underlines his emotional detachment from the mourning process. By dismissing the act of crying as "silly," Billy distances himself from the typical human response to death, further emphasizing his detachment from conventional emotions and societal norms.

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.

So It Goes & Poo-tee-weet Within the novel Slaughterhouse Five the author Kurt Vonnegut uses symbols and themes within the narrative to help reveal the mental effects of war. Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time because his mind is mentally going through a breakdown because of the things he seen in war. “Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next”(Vonnegut, 23).

Slaughterhouse Five is a novel that follows the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has “come unstuck in time” and who was also captured in the Battle of the Bulge, taken prisoner by the Germans, and kept in a slaughterhouse during the Dresden bombings. Once Billy is unstuck in time he is able to see his life events out of order in a third person perspective. He is able to realize his purpose in life and realize his mistakes he made along the way through this process. Billy along with the reader realizes the connections Vonnegut makes to humanity power and language while on this journey. Although Billy is experiencing his life out of order the book is still very logical in the sense that Vonnegut puts the pieces to his life's purpose in the order he is seeing his life.

Baruch Spinoza once said “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He compared free-will with destiny and ended up that what we live and what we think are all results of our destiny; and the concept of the free-will as humanity know is just the awareness of the situation. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores this struggle between free-will and destiny, and illustrates the idea of time in order to demonstrate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut conveys this through irony, symbolism and satire.

The playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde one stated that “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.” People who do not conform to our own idea of morality are all together considered immoral by our own rationalizations. Sometimes people do things that they know are most likely immoral, but yet they still have a reason to justify what they did as being not that immoral. In certain situations people are quick to give judgement based on what someone does and will decide if the person is right for how they handle a situation. For instance, doing or selling drugs is immoral and is something that should not be done. Yet if someone does drugs and has a reasonable answer for doing them, it then sort of makes

New transoceanic communication and strengthening of European countries led to the onset of the era of imperialism when the European colonial empires gained control over most of the planet. European desire for a trade, consumption, creation of empires, and the use of slave labor has had a tremendous impact on many regions of the world. Spain took a direct part in the destruction of aggressive American empires, but only in order to take their place and introduce their religion by force. Spanish example of the violent expansion of areas of influence has been repeated by other European empires, most clearly - the Netherlands, Russia, France and Britain. The new religion has replaced the old "pagan" rituals also spread new languages, political and

Vonnegut calls upon his personal experiences to create his breakthrough work, Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut expresses his own feeling on war, family, and free will through the non-linear narrative of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. His experience as a soldier and death within his family are mirrored into Pilgrim’s character.

We all wish we could travel through time, going back to correct our stupid mistakes or zooming ahead to see the future. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, however, time travel does not seem so helpful. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's main character, has come unstuck in time. He bounces back and forth between his past, present, and future lives in a roller coaster time trip that proves both senseless and numbing. Examining Billy's time traveling, his life on Tralfamadore, and the novel's schizophrenic structure shows that time travel is actually a metaphor for our human tendency to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of death.

The positional data in the three-dimensional space (latitude, longitude, and altitude) for EWR arrival flights, including all minute-by-minute arrival flight tracks were selected from FAA Aircraft Situation Display to Industry (ASDI) data services. The ASDI information consists of components like flight plans, position reports, flight diversions, and cancellations. The position reports were the updates of aircraft positions every time when the computers were aware of a position amend (i.e. every 12 seconds for enroute RADAR or 5 seconds for TRACON).