Slaughterhouse Five By Kurt Vonnegut

A known problem in today’s society is the tendency to avoid problems by ignoring them. This has been mocked and satirized by the media, studied by scientists, and become an almost humorous staple in modern culture. However, none of the reactions to this problem have come close to solving it. In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut tell the story of a war veteran, Billy Pilgrim, who jumps around time and is kidnapped by an alien race called the Tralfamadorians. He delves into themes of war and morality while offering a look into the mind of veterans after they return from war and how it affects them. Vonnegut explores humanity’s destruction of the Earth with a similar morbid yet dryly humorous approach in his poem Requiem. In both texts, Vonnegut

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.

Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut chooses to use special literary techniques that better explain his own encounters in war as well as help his readers bare the horridness of war. Vonnegut adds black humor in his text to benefit readers as well as “an author-as-character” perspective to set barriers and help protect his own memories in the war. Without adding these two specific devices, Vonnegut could possibly have lost reader’s interests in the book or lost his own interest in writing the book.

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.

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five he talks about many different themes. He quotes, makes fun of, and uses many different themes. I would like to talk about one major theme in Slaughterhouse Five, religion. In the book he uses religion to teach important lessons, he used it as inspiration, and he even pokes fun at religion.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut followed many principles in his writings. He claimed that “people do not realize that they are happy” (PBS NOW Transcript). Feeling that people had the wrong view on war, he felt that he needed to get the facts straight. Vonnegut believed that art can come from awful situations, and that the truth is not always easy to look at. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse – Five to tell of his experience in the bombing of Dresden, as a prisoner in war and the atrocities that occurred.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut takes places on two contrasting planets. One is Earth, where war tears apart families and minds, and the other is Tralfamadore, where supernatural alien beings share their extended knowledge of the world. Vonnegut uses the two planets, Earth and Tralfamadore, to show the contrasting ideas of chaos and order, and that human actions have limitations that render them helpless against a meaningless universe.

      Marked by two world wars and the anxiety that accompanies humanity's knowledge of the ability to destroy itself, the Twentieth Century has produced literature that attempts to depict the plight of the modern man living in a modern waste land. If this sounds dismal and bleak, it is. And that is precisely why the dark humor of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. shines through our post-modern age. The devastating bombing of Dresden, Germany at the close of World War II is the subject of Vonnegut's most highly acclaimed work, Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. Vonnegut's experience as an American POW in Dresden

Author Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, “We must believe in free will, we have no choice” (Brainy Quote). While many philosophers do not believe in free will, most, like Singer, acknowledge its necessity for moral accountability, or “the [status of] a moral agent [being] blameworthy or praiseworthy for some particular action” (Stanford University). However, Vonnegut illustrates his beliefs that people have the capacity to change their perceptions and are morally obligated to do so. In Kurt Vonnegut’s antiwar novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, becomes “unstuck in time” as he revisits his traumatic World War II experiences. Vonnegut’s war experiences are similar, but his reactions are different. By contrasting Billy’s experiences with his own, Vonnegut conveys his belief that while people should accept the inevitable, humans also have the illusion of free will and therefore are morally responsible to view war as unacceptable.

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.

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 story of Slaughterhouse Five is about a man named Billy Pilgrim who goes through a series of strange events throughout his life time. And it all starts when he is in a war in Germany. Billy is resentful towards the war and he makes it clear that he does not want to be there. During the war, he becomes captured by Germans. Before Billy is captured, he meets Roland Weary. When captured, the Germans took everything from Weary, including his shoes so they gave him clogs as a substitute. Eventually, he dies from gangrene caused by the clogs. Right before Weary dies, he manages to convince another soldier; Paul Lazzaro that it was Billy’s fault that he was dying so Lazzaro vows to avenge the death of Weary by killing Billy.

Throughout the novel, Vonnegut uses different characters to display his anti-war feelings and show how many innocent victims end up being casualties in a war. In order to display this effectively, he uses Edgar Derby as an example. Edgar Derby was a high school teacher that willingly left his career to fight in the war. He was much older then most of then most of the men he was serving with including his son who was also fighting in the war. Derby was also one of the soldiers that experienced the firebombing in Dresden with Billy. After the bombing occurred Derby and the others were sifting through the damage and he picked up a teapot. Later on in the book Derby is arrested for stealing this simplistic item and is sentenced to death by firing squad. This really bothered Billy because he saw an innocent man that he was friends with get killed for a teapot. Some can argue that this is just an aspect of war that soldiers need

Slaughterhouse-five strives to remember the tragedy of the bombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut constructs his novel around a main character who becomes “unstuck in time” (23). Billy Pilgrim’s life is told out of order, which gives him a different perspective than the rest of the world. Billy lives through his memories, and revisits events in his life at random times and without warning. Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim to the Tralfamadorian way of thinking about memory and time so that he can cope with being unstuck in time. The Tralfamadorian ideology is set up as an alternative to the human ideology of life. In the novel Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut constructs a reality where memory is unproductive through the Tralfamadorian