Vonnegut Summary

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

Author Kurt Vonnegut suggests that total equality is not something worth striving for. To obtain physical and mental equality among all citizens, the government makes beautiful people wear masks, intelligent people listen to noises that block their abilities to think, and graceful and strong people wear weights around their necks at all times. While equality may be achieved, freedom is the price to pay.

Kurt Vonnegut’s unique story “Harrison Bergeron,” displays a theme which is a warning about the dangers of equality, which is equality is a hindrance to an individual’s success and society’s success, but this hindrance is ironically, unequal. In the story, Harrison and his bride are arrested for their unwillingness and inability to stay within the bounds of equality enforced by the Handicapper General. Equality hinders the success of an individual like the weights hinder the beauty and grace of the ballerinas in the story. Equality doesn’t promote everyone to be equally better, but to be unequally worse. Handicaps are no use in ensuring equality, because one’s strengths will always shine through, such as Harrison’s strength and wit, or the

Kurt Vonnegut published “Harrison Bergeron” to express his thoughts of what a world with equality might look like. The setting of this takes place in front of a TV to emphasis how much is it looked to for answers. The government wants everyone the same and will go to any means necessary. In the constitution, “all men are created equal” can be found, and this short story explores the ideas of when that sentence is taken too literal. In “Harrison Bergeron,” Vonnegut paints his readers a picture illustrating the dangers of conforming three different individuals, Hazel, George, and Harrison, to the same level of expectation through the power of government control and television.

Vonnegut successfully makes point, that trying to make a perfect world, where all things are equal, is impossible and will cause trouble. In the 1960’s equal rights were a big goal to achieve. People aiming towards equal rights for blacks, women, and even homosexuals. Vonnegut uses

The Mind of Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut is one of the preeminent writers of the later half of the twentieth century. His works are all windows into his mind, a literary psychoanalysis. He examines himself as a cog in the corporate machine in "Deer in the Works"; as a writer through the eyes of Kilgore Trout in several works; and most importantly, as a prisoner of war in Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut created short stories and novels that dealt with events in his life. One of the most obvious self examinations is in "Deer in the Works".

All people are different in their own way and should not be told different. In the short story “Harrison Bergeron” the author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. uses literary device’s effectively to articulate the theme in regards to total equality and how it can be dangerous. The passage Harrison Bergeron is set in the future, where the government have made everyone equal. A group of Handicapper Generals enforce the laws of equality. People are made equal by a device which brings them down to a normal level, which is below- average in intelligence, strength, and ability.

Additionally, there is no comparison between better one and another. However, by providing norm, the government stifle the creativity and uniqueness. Vonnegut Jr. tells us our reasons of living should not be based on copying others or equalize each

On one instance the author says, “Nobody was smarter than anyone else. Nobody was better looking than anyone else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. ”(Vonnegut) This shows emphasis on the enforced equality that is the total opposite of the “old” so called “dark ages.”

Vonnegut reveals that equality reduces those with talent to the least common denominator, though his detailed description of George. On the first page, Vonnegut gives a summary of what society was like in the year 2081 and how no one was above anyone else. While describing George, he adds that George has

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..

Predestination In Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a major dichotomy is Free Will vs. Fate. This was first pointed out on November 5 when Sam W. said, “There is predestination on Tralfamadore, but there is free will on Earth. A small debate began to take place with Jason saying, “Free will does exist. I do not think destiny will control my path.

Author Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, and this museum and library is dedicated to the late artist for his contributions in the field of arts and literature. The facility was opened to public in the year 2011, and is located in the Emelie Building. It serves as a library, reading room, museum, art gallery and a cultural and educational resource facility, all-in- one. On display at the museum are paintings, pictures and books related to the author's life. Other interesting items on display are the author's Pall Mall cigarettes, droll drawings and rejection letters from various publishers. The library has been replicated like the office of the author, and is complete with checkerboard carpet, red rooster lamp and blue Coronamatic typewriter.

When I was fourteen years old I bought a copy of “Slaughter-house Five” at a bookstore in Lexington Kentucky. I was in Kentucky visiting my sister with my parents and we had stopped at the bookstore on our way back home. I was not a fast reader but I read the entire book on the car trip. From then on I was hooked on Kurt Vonnegut. What I liked about him wasn’t what I perceived to be his Sci-fi bent or his sarcastic tone, although to be honest it didn’t hurt. What I loved, and still love, about his books is his honesty. Of all the authors that I have read in my life, Vonnegut has always seemed to me to be the most honest, the anger that his narrators feel in his books is his anger, and it’s his frustration. Those books, “Slaughter-house

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.