Slaughterhouse Five Literary Analysis

In Vonnegut's “Slaughterhouse Five” he demonstrates how death is a thing that is out of our control and happens to everyone. Vonnegut throughout the book portrays Billy's feeling and emotions towards death in many ways: through his different phrases and the ways he talks about his own death. Billy uses this quote after talking about a death that has occured over his lifetime.

(Vonnegut,1). This quote shows that the things Billy witnessed during the war were terrible and traumatic. The quote also shows the harshness of the being involved there. An example from the article would

They could always visit him or her with the use of time travel when he or she was alive. Because the phrase was very often repeated, it somewhat served as a tally to show how frequently death occurs and just how inevitable it is. Billy knew the exact date of his death and how it would happen, but he could not alter it and was no longer afraid of dying, so it had no effect on him because “there is no why[,]” it just “simply is” (77; ch4). He learned this from the Tralfamadorians.

Similar to time, is death, Billy experienced a lot of this during the war. Death was on a regular basis throughout Billy’s life. “...Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn’t make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes”(Vonnegut 93). Obviously champagne isn’t a big deal for us, but what about this passage,

The point of view that Slaughterhouse-Five is written from also affects the way the reader fells about time after reading the novel. Since the story is narrated by a omniscient being that is everywhere with Billy Pilgrim, the reader gets a first hand account of every event in his life. Also Billy is very relaxed and accepting all things around him. A good example of this is Billy's habit of following every death with "so it goes". (Vonnegut 69) The repetition of this phrase not only de-emphasizes death, but also helps Vonnegut assert control over the readers response after a death. (Dawley 2) The way Billy

The central conflict of this book is Billy coming to terms with the unfortunate events happening around him, and facing this character versus world scenario of everything and everyone always being against him in some way or another. Billy sees so much suffering and so much death. He is blamed for the death of Ronald Weary, which is not his fault. He witnesses the Dresden Firebombing, and has an overall uneventful blain life to begin with. Billy needs to find a way to cope with this unbearable pressure, and whether or not the Tralmalfadorians are real, their message is real to Billy. The philosophy they present is the excuse Billy needs to justify all the wrong he sees around him. The Tralmalfadorian belief being that there is no free will, and that you timeline is fact, and that you simply experience death, but continue “existing” afterwards. Essentially, you always exist and what happens to you is predetermined fate. This allows Billy to pass on all of the death and misery around him as meant to be. He can rest assured knowing that there is nothing he could about anything in the past, present, or future. There was nothing he could have done or can do to stop the death and torture, weather it is the death of his wife, the firebombing in Dresden, or even his own death. This motivation-less philosophy is his resolution to his devastating conflict, and is directly responsible for his lack of action throughout the story.

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..

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.

The Roman Catholic Church responded treatment of Luther, Huguenots in France, relationship with the Holy Roman Emperor, the Jesuits and the Council of Trent, treatment of Galileo and other scientists very differently. Luther was called before Emperor Charles V to recant his beliefs. Although some German Princes sided with Luther, it was still declared an outlaw. He protected by a German Prince Frederick the Wise. He translates Erasmus’ Greek Bible into German. Holy Roman Emperor and the RCC were political allies. Prince’s allied with Luther to indirectly challenge the emperor. Huguenots in France worked to reform the rest of France, but the Catholic King Henry III was not about to let that happen. King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, this resulted in driving out hundreds of thousands of his best citizens abroad. The monks at Cluny were challenging the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, there was also the idea of separation of church and state. By 1050, King Henry III appointed the Pope he liked which was Clement II. After his death the archbishops were able to elect the Pope. Henry IV had a serious threat to his stability. He made his bishops swear loyalty to him. When Gregory excommunicated Henry he begged for forgiveness and he got it; after Henry was back to placing bishops, he was excommunicated again. The Germans were eager to see a weakened king siding with the church. The Holy Roman Empire was no way united, still very strong, but they had no control over its

Billy’s physical description is something learned along the in the novel in short detail. What is most important to his character is he is described to be able to move on from tragedy relatively quickly. Billy takes life in stride, and chooses to “concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones” in order to bear the difficulties and crises he faces (Vonnegut 89). When reading the book, one can assume that Billy is unaffected by tragedy because he has the ability to time-travel and handles tragedy at various times, but this statement is never affirmed or outright stated in the novel. When “Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning” and he pressed on despite the fact that he should have been emotionally traumatized (Vonnegut 15). Only towards the end of Slaughterhouse-Five do we see Billy constantly revisiting memories and traumatic experiences. One may assume this is because Billy is finally realizing the heartache and sadness that his life has been surrounded by. His life has caught up with him after so many years of running away. Because Vonnegut never explains this, it is understood that time is a human creation of a coping mechanism. It helps individuals quantify their lives and find meaning, which is what

The anti-war story of Slaughterhouse-Five centers on an awkward Billy Pilgrim, a man who travels through time and has had extraordinary experiences on the planet Tralfamadore with its inhabitants, the Tralfamadorians. Pilgrim, like Vonnegut, fought in World War II and was still relatively new to the war when he was taken as prisoner by German soldiers. He too was held in a slaughterhouse underground, which led to his survival of the 1945 Dresden Firebombing, and was also held behind to gather and burn the remains of the dead. Pilgrim claims that on his daughter’s wedding night, he was first abducted by the Tralfamadorians, the aliens that inhabited the planet Tralfamadore. These aliens have a fourth dimension; time. The Tralfamadorians view time as a literal timeline; everything is predetermined, and they can access any point of time at their will. Pilgrim returns to earth and believes that it is his duty to make humans aware of this philosophy, and to spread the Tralfamadorians’ message. By the end of the book, the reader comes to find that the time shifting and extraterrestrial experiences

But ignoring death and its suffering is exactly what Billy should not be doing, Vonnegut suggests. To do so makes him, like the Tralfamadorians, alien and inhuman. He has no sense of his own mortality, an awareness he needs in order to understand that, as Stephen Marten has observed, "life is valuable not because it is infinite but because it is so scarce" (11).

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.

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional because the capital-punishment laws gave states the discretion to impose the death sentence in a manner the states deemed appropriate; therefore, disproportionately imposing the sentence on the disadvantaged, African-Americans and other races or groups of people that states identified as insufficient . Nevertheless, it is a known fact that race and poverty have always corrupted our legal system when loopholes in the Thirteenth Amendment allowed convict leasing to emerge through a series of restrictive laws known as the Black Codes, resulting in the unjustified incarceration of African-Americans. Unfortunately, in 21st Century America, our criminal justice system continues

There are so many ways on how to practice mercy and compassion. There are three simple steps given to us by Pope Francis during his apostolic visit here in the Philippines on how to become ministers of mercy and compassion. First is to rest with God. Second is to renew one’s self. Third is to love others.