The Awakening Answer Key

The plot of Slaughterhouse- Five revolves around World War Two, especially the bombing of Dresden from a soldier’s perspective. Vonnegut vividly describes the destructive nature of war through accounts of ambush, mistreatment of prisoners of war, and massacres. However, he also expresses the mentally and emotionally damaging effects of war with the pure insanity of Billy Pilgrim. One of many instances illustrating Billy’s altered state of mind in the war is when he arrives in a prisoner of war camp. The English prisoners put on a production of Cinderella for their American guests and following a comical line Billy loses control. “He not only laughed – he shrieked. He went on shrieking until he was carried out of the shed into another, where the hospital was” (Slaughterhouse 98). This is a single example of the deplorable state of Billy’s mental sanity. The reader is already aware that Billy also begins to hallucinate and have crazy notions that he was abducted by aliens. Billy even acquires a sort of catchphrase that clearly demonstrates how emotionally distant Billy has become because of the war. Every time death is brought up, Billy has only one thing to say about it: “So it goes” (Slaughterhouse 214). This shows that Billy has become numb to pain, anguish, fear, and even life itself. To Billy, the end of the war did not actually bring freedom, but trapped him inside the horrors of his memories and deranged

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a story written in the late 19th century about a woman named Edna becoming independent and finding herself in a time when women had little to no rights and were seen as property of their husband. Racism, sexism, and feminism were all going on when this book was written, and therefore influenced it greatly.

The novel The Awakening is an empowering masterpiece that shows a woman stepping out of the social norm to find her bliss. Edna Pontellier is expected to be the perfect wife and perfect mother. The needs of her husband and children are supposed to triumph over her own. She is well ahead of her time because she wants independence and to live her life to the fullest. In Chopin’s story, not only is there a daring young woman who is on the hunt to find her independence, but there is also a housewife, whose life belongs to her family.

Another literary device Vonnegut uses within his Slaughterhouse-Five is black humor. This is found in the book so readers are able to feel more lighthearted when remembering the war. There are though, critics who believe by adding black humor, Vonnegut is degrading the tragedy of war. I believe Vonnegut uses black humor in his attempt to console readers (as well as himself), in hopes of making the horrific, painful, unthinkable events of the war more bearable to read about.

When Kurt Vonnegut traveled home for Mother's day in 1944 his mother had been found dead due to an overdose on sleeping pills. The death of his mother would haunt him for the rest of his life (Farrell n.p.) However, this was not the end to the deaths in his family. In 1958,” Vonnegut’s family life took a traumatic turn...when his sister Alice died of cancer forty-eight hours after her husband, James Carmalt Adams, had been killed in a commuter train crash in New York City.”(Farrell n.p.) Vonnegut lost these three people who were close to him and tells emphasises his feelings about death in his novel. He stresses numerous times that the killing of the people in Dresden was horrible even if it was supposedly necessary for the Americans to win the war. Billy Pilgrim’s family also has a turn of events that end up tearing his family apart within a small window of time just as Vonnegut's had. On the day of Billy's plane crash, which resulted in him being the lone survivor, Billy’s wife rushed to the hospital only to be killed due to carbon monoxide poisoning upon arriving. Death is something that Vonnegut struggled to overcome and influenced this

The Slaughterhouse Five novel, is a fictional and nonfictional delight all clashed into one. The author, Kurt Vonnegut, amazingly combines a fictional character’s life with the nonfictional influence of what Kurt himself had experienced. As well as major topics being debated on and dealt with today. Billy Pilgrim takes hold of the story’s main protagonist as a prisoner of war during the Dresden raids in eastern Germany. While reading, I found many relationships in the novel to common concerns, such as time and death; too correlated opinions from other anti-war enthusiasts.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five demonstrates the importance of perspective. It challenges some of the most important human ideas that unite us and shape the human perspective, and presents an alternate world that is equally true. In addition, it achieves that status as the “greatest anti-war book of all time” by demonstrating the missing pieces in our view of war.

Kurt Vonnegut’s background had an endless influence upon his writing. In his early years, Vonnegut was a private in the 106th infantry division in World War II. He and five scouts were caught behind enemy lines, and then captured. They were held POWs and were beaten on various occasions. In 1945, they witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. Kept during this time in a slaughterhouse, this is part of the inspiration for Slaughterhouse-five. After being released from the Slaughterhouse, Vonnegut called Dresden “utter destruction” and “carnage unfathomable”. This distressing time in his life led to one of the many themes of Slaughterhouse-five which is that nothing good can come from war and a massacre. This theme

In Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening a wife and a mother of two, Edna Pontellier, discovers her desires as a woman to live life to the fullest extent and to find her true self. Eventually, her discovery leads to friction between friends, family, and the dominant values of society. Through Chopin's use of Author’s craft and literary elements, the readers have a clear comprehension as to what the author is conveying.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is a telling work of fiction that blends the author’s experiences with the horror of war with a touch of science fiction and a healthy dose of humor. The novel guides us through the experiences of a man on a journey in both directions of time, through war, and the delusions brought on by the horrors therein. The pilgrimage Billy is on is broken up by milestones that read “so it goes”. The journey is a vessel for Vonnegut to show the reader how war can desensitize a man to death and cause him to recede into coping mechanisms, but that a man cannot be desensitized to suffering.

The anti-war message is upheld further with the ironies that Vonnegut provides in the book. One example is "when one of the soldiers, a POW, survives the fire-bombing, but dies afterward from the dry heaves because he has to bury dead bodies" (Vit). When Billy and one of his comrades join to other scouts the Vonnegut portrays as well trained, Vonnegut displays irony by killing the skillful scouts and allows the less competent Pilgrim and Roland to survive. Roland does eventually die because he is forced to walk around in wooden clogs that turn his feet to pudding. The greatest example of irony is seen in what Vonnegut claims to be the climax of the story. He explains the situation before the story even begins. He is referring to the:

Throughout the essay you can tell what Vonnegut is feeling through his tone when he writes. Vonnegut expresses this by saying, “The facile reply to great groans such as mine is the most hateful of all clichés, ‘fortunes of war,’ and another, ‘They asked for it. All they understand is force.’ Who asked for it? The only thing who understands is force?” (43). Vonnegut's use of italics shows his anger for the war and the people who support it. Along with the italics, the question marks provide a dramatic emphasis on how he feels about blaming the supposed enemy for being bombed. His tone of anger is not something you would find in SH5 because SH5 focus on the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) war veterans, and Vonnegut himself, feel after the war. It shows the horror of war through the pain and numbness of someone who

Any veteran who has ever been through combat, or has seen it firsthand, can attest to the fact that it is difficult to return to the normalcy of their everyday lives. The things they saw and heard on the battlefield tend to play over and over in their minds, often making it hard to function on a day to day basis. Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien are no exceptions to this post-war experience, and both use their writing to escape the overwhelming feelings that would have otherwise consumed them. Even though, Slaughterhouse Five and The Things They Carry are both coping mechanisms for the authors, they differ in the way in which the authors express their grief. Kurt Vonnegut uses his novel to create a world in which there is no free will, therefore

Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” is one of the first novels to explore the depiction of a woman's desire for independence and sexual freedom. A woman’s presumed satisfaction with domesticity is challenged by this piece of literature, and revels the drastic consequences of a woman who attempts to gain greater self-awareness. This leads to the theme that even when the truth is discovered it can be oppressed by the realization that, that truth will never be spoken or come into reality. This causes a deep emotional journey for the protagonist, developing key symbols that reflect her states of mind. This symbolic representation found within the story also highlights the growing dissatisfaction that many women had with the restrictions placed on the gendered expectations of American women during the time that

““How many years have I slept?” she inquired. “The whole island seems changed. A new race of beings must have sprung up, leaving only you and me as past relics.””(Chopin 67). The turn of the century was on the horizon, coinciding with those who seek change, rising with the dawn of the new era. One movement to emerge was that of feminism; the challenging of equity and social expectations for women. Kate Chopin’s revolutionary novel The Awakening serves as a catalyst for much of the 20th century’s critique on the place of women in society, particularly pertaining to expression, equality, and Chopin's juxtaposition of men and women.