Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

First of all, Vonnegut and Dahl both grew up in religious families. However, as most people do, they outgrew some of their families’ beliefs as they became older. One of the outgrown beliefs was their religion. Kurt Vonnegut’s family were Christians, and he grew up following the word of God. However, as he got older, he converted to agnosticism. In Vonnegut’s book, Palm Sunday, he states, “I would like to recapture what has been lost. Why? Because I, as a Christ-worshipping agnostic, have seen so much un-Christian impatience with the poor encouraged by the quotation ‘For the poor always ye have with you’’’ (qtd. in Beiler). He admits to being agnostic, but still says he loves Christ. In Roald Dahl’s case, he grew up catholic and even attended a catholic school (“Roald Dahl Biography”). Like Vonnegut, Dahl converted after realizing the hypocrisy of the Christian faith when he saw pastors preach about forgiveness one day, and then flog a boy for a small offense the next. He wrote in his autobiography, “I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither forgiveness nor mercy in

In Kurt Vonnegut’s eyes, America is being taught that some books and ideas are tantamount to diseases. As a consequence, the humorous, satirical novel Cat’s Cradle has been unjustly challenged in a few areas of the United States. The novel looks at the structures that curb our society, especially in religion and science, and contains an educational value that is paramount in correlation to its suggestive themes. Therefore, despite Cat’s Cradle’s minor suggestive content, including religious satire and mature themes, the book possesses important concepts that should not be overshadowed by these negligible reasons. It is puzzling how the novel received bans for such irrational conclusions.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is one of the most well known World War II authors. His humble beginnings and early life misfortunes shaped not only his writings, but also his view of the world. His imprisonment in Dresden in World War II, however, formed his opinions about war at an early age and later inspired many of his works and style of writing. After the returning from World War II, Vonnegut voiced his sentiments through his writing that war was wasteful and uncivilized. Vonnegut developed a unique blend of sadness, satire, and simplicity, along with his ability to understand the audience, which made his novels comprehensible and inspirational to any

Kurt Vonnegut writes pessimistic novels, or at least he did back in the sixties. Between Slaughterhouse Five, Mother Night, and Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut paints a cynical and satirical picture of the degradation of society using distortion as the primary means to express himself. In Cat's Cradle, the reader is confronted with the story of the narrator, John, as he attempts to gather material to write a book on the human aspect of the day Japan was bombed. As the

Kurt Vonnegut presents Billy Pilgrim’s faith in Jesus on a more logical stand point of reasoning. “Vonnegut’s position is clear; he rejects both Tralfamadorianism and divinely oriented Christianity, while unambiguously affirming a humanly centered Christianity in which Jesus is a “nobody” a “bum,” a “man.” (Vanderwerken, 1). Although this book seemingly criticizes Jesus, it is revealed that Billy Pilgrim has a trace of faith as shown on a plaque he owns and the way he expresses his moral standards. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change...”

Kurt Vonnegut is an American novelist from Indianapolis, Indiana, born in 1922. A very important part of his life was when he served in WWII where he was taken as a prisoner of

Curiously, Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian idea that books, like life, should have "no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects" (88). As he states on the title page of , his novel is written "somewhat in the telegraphic, schizophrenic manner of the tales of the planet Tralfamadore" (i). True to his promise, the book has no orderly plot but

Kurt Vonnegut, arguably the greatest American writer of the mid-1900’s, had experienced a variety of difficult events in his life that he incorporated into his writing, which made his work very unique and personalized. Although he doesn’t always explicitly explain his specific experiences in his short stories, he portrays them through his impactful style of writing. In 1944, Vonnegut was enlisted into the army and sent to Dresden, Germany, where he was later captured as a prisoner of war. While there, he watched the city become destroyed by an Allied bombing and was in utter disbelief. He states, “The destruction of Dresden was my first experience with really fantastic waste... To burn down a habitable city and a beautiful one at that. I was

Theme There are multiple themes in Slaughterhouse Five such as Freewill and Fate, Time, and War. War is a big part in the book because the book seems to revolve around it. War brings ethical and unethical decisions like the bombing of Dresden. The reason of why the bombing was unethical was because it was a open city that didn’t want to produce war goods and was filled with citizens who hadn’t done anything to encourage the Germans to fight the Americans. War is also bad because in the book there is a young boy named Gluck who is fighting for the Germans, which shows how war is wrong because it’s like sending young people into a death march.

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,

As an author, Kurt Vonnegut has received just about every kind of praise an author can receive: his works held the same sway over American philosophy as did those of Jack Kerouac or J.R.R. Tolkein; his writing has received acclaim from academics and the masses alike; and three of his books have been made into feature films. Society has permanently and noticeably been altered by his writing. Through accessible language and easily-understood themes, Vonnegut has created works subtle, engrossing, and familiar. His main method for doing this is by exploiting a theme with which everyone is familiar and about which everyone has his own opinion: religion.

Kurt Vonnegut’s personal experiences of World War II and the firebombing of Dresden were important factors in determining his writing style and the political and philosophical views that it conveyed. Throughout his works, the overarching message that Vonnegut delivers is the need for love and compassion in a world where humans are helpless against an indifferent fate.

Kurt Vonnegut is the author of the book Slaughterhouse Five. Of course it was controversial, and still is. The first chapter addresses the conflicts of creating such a novel in the first chapter of the book. In the book Harrison Starr questioned Vonnegut asking if his book were to be a war book. Vonnegut said it was and Starr “Why don’t you make an anti-glacier book instead?” (4). Vonnegut believed what Starr meant by that was wars, like glaciers, are as unpredictable and unstoppable. (4). As one gets farther into the book it completely changed dynamics. The novel then goes into the story of Billy Pilgrim instead of the autobiographical view from the first chapter. The three main literary elements in which will be focusing on analysing is theme,

Reading is usually not my favorite thing in the world, but last year I found books that I really enjoyed, and realized why I enjoyed them. One of the books that I read was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The story of Billy Pilgrim really drew me into the book and I found myself just reading it for fun. I’m a pretty big history buff, and WWII is a big part of the story. This made me realize that one of the main reasons I was enjoying this novel was the historical aspect. I even enjoyed Vonnegut’s work so much that I downloaded another work of his. Another book I read last year was Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby. This book drew my attention due to me being a huge basketball fan, from the moment I started reading it, and finding

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