Slaughterhouse Five Literary Analysis

Billy Pilgrim is the person that the book is written around. We follow him, perhaps not in a straight order, from his youth joining the military to his abduction on the alien planet of Tralmalfadore, to his older age at his 1960s home in Illum. It is his experiences and journeys that we follow, and his actions we read about. However, Billy had a specific lack of character for a main one. He is not heroic, he has very little personality traits, let alone an immersive and complex character. Most of the story is written around his experiences that seem more like symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his World War Two days, combined with hallucinations after a brain injury in a near-fatal plane

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.

In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, free will is an important theme throughout the story of Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut suggests that free will doesn’t exist and that humans can not control what happens in their life. He also presents the idea that predestination will guide you to where you are supposed to be in life and when humans choose what to do it’s not really them deciding, it is what’s supposed to happen. With that, he displays a contrast on how free will can exist. Free will can become difficult to understand, but Vonnegut’s use of it as a significant theme will help readers to further understand the novel and how free will contributes to the story.

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.

In questioning the value of literary realism, Flannery O'Connor has written, "I am interested in making a good case for distortion because it is the only way to make people see."

It is expected for arguments to arise when writing about controversial topics. Many times the meaning of a book is not as obvious as the author intended, which may lead to problems. Other times, books are challenged because they contain sexual or inappropriate material. When Kurt Vonnegut released Slaughterhouse-Five critics were quick to judge his peculiar way of writing. Although Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five was oftentimes misunderstood, interpreted as inappropriate, and judged for the peculiar point of view, critics seem to appreciate and accept one aspect of it: the structure of the book.

“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

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.

In many novels, the idea of time is handled in different ways to keep the story at a smooth pace. Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, uses time as a way to give the reader an idea of what his main character’s life was like and what he had gone through throughout his life. Vonnegut’s manipulation of time may make the story confusing to some at times, but he effectively explains his character’s background through this different use of time.

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..

However, Vonnegut asserts that although God may not exist, free will may not exist either. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he summarizes his opinions with the comment; "among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future (SF 60)." According to the Tralfamadorians, time is constant, and not dynamic. To them, "all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist„.they can see how permanent all the moments are (SF 27)." Because of this, the decisions we make are not due to free will; instead, they occur because "everybody has to do exactly what he does (SF 198)." In Cat’s Cradle, Jonah, the main character, does not travel through time as Billy Pilgrim does, yet he is able to come to the same realization that time is more like a static stretch of mountains than a flowing river. However, unlike Billy, Jonah must discover this without the help of the Tralfamadorians. When Jonah experiences "a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind (CC 67)," he is finally able to understand how all of time is connected.

Determinism, particularly pre-determinism, states that the origin of creation controls when and why all events of the past, present, and future occur, which decisively contradicts the belief in free will of the majority of humans in today’s society. Slaughterhouse-Five follows the life of Billy Pilgrim, a young man who has become “unstuck” in time. The novel traces Billy’s experiences during the bombing of Dresden in World War II, an encounter with extraterrestrials, called Tralfamadorians, and throughout his domestic life as a father, husband, and optometrist. In particular, Kurt Vonnegut explores the bombing of Dresden and the effects thereof on Billy Pilgrim, forming Billy into an apparently insane character who speaks of

Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time. Although he does not know everything as the Tralfamadorian’s do and is not able to live each moment at the same time, he is able to move swiftly through time and his memories. Billy is the bridge between the Tralfamadorian beliefs and human beliefs in order to show that humans depend on memory. Billy shows that memory is productive. The Tralfamadorian’s depict a “So it goes” attitude towards death, because when a person dies they are never truly gone. They are still existing in other moments, which the Tralfamadorian’s are able to see at all times. Billy adopts the “So it goes” attitude when people die, but only because he is also able to revisit his memories with the deceased at any moment. However, humans are unable to adopt this attitude towards death. Once a person dies, they solely exist in one’s memories. But unlike the Tralfamadorian’s fourth dimension, and unlike Billy’s ability to time travel, human memory fades overtime and often becomes inaccessible. Yet, once a person has passed away, one can only interact with them through their memories. Humans are not able to adopt the “So it goes” attitude, because when someone dies it is permanent. Human’s heavily rely on memory, remembering is productive and serves a purpose.

Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel written by Kurt Vonnegut, tells the story of the devastating effects of war on a man, Billy Pilgrim, who joins the army fight in World War II. The semi-autobiographical novel sheds light on one of history’s most tragic, yet rarely spoken of events, the 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany.

It embodies what Hardy sees as the tragic relation of mind and reality” (Bloom 98). In this case, determinism is revealed through fate and destiny. This can be seen in the poem “The Convergence of Twain”. In “The Convergence of Twain”: Dennis Tyler determines that “... the Immanent Will was welded together the ‘paths coincident’ of the iceberg and the Titanic which now ‘Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres’ ” (Bloom 113). The Immanent Will is the indifferent force that determines the fate. In this case, it determined the fate and destiny of the Titanic. Thomas Hardy explains that as the Titanic was being built and formed, the iceberg that ended up breaking the ship was as well being built and formed by the universe. The Titanic and the iceberg are complementary because the fate was already