Vonnegut 's ' Slaughterhouse Five '

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

Both characters, Billy Pilgrim and Roland Weary, are imaginative. Billy has a different type of imagining than from Roland. Billy’s way of thinking is to be more “out of the box” or fantasy. Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the book, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” about Billy Pilgrim saying, “And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was

… Disorientation and confusion“ ("Trauma/PTSD"). Vonnegut writes, in one of the very first chapters, “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day” (Vonnegut 23). Throughout the book we are taken on a spastic and wild journey from one moment in Pilgrim’s life to another. For instance, Pilgrim is walking through the horribly cold, bleak and depressing German landscape with “The Three Musketeers” and ends up being dragged by Weary most of the way. As soon as the two scouts ditch him and Weary and it seems their ordeal couldn’t get any worse, Pilgrim “time travels” to a moment in which he has just won the Presidency of The Lion’s Club and proceeds to gives an impressive speech. (Vonnegut 48-50). This sort of behavior, completely dissociating oneself from the horrible situation at hand, is typical of PTSD. Pilgrim wanted to escape completely from the cold and depressing “hell” he was in and be back in happiness, where he had just won a successful campaign for the Presidency of his club. This is what happens throughout the book and it is simply another example of Pilgrim’s widespread and horribly debilitating case of PTSD.

Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut chooses to use special literary techniques that better explain his own encounters in war as well as help his readers bare the horridness of war. Vonnegut adds black humor in his text to benefit readers as well as “an author-as-character” perspective to set barriers and help protect his own memories in the war. Without adding these two specific devices, Vonnegut could possibly have lost reader’s interests in the book or lost his own interest in writing the book.

Willing to go to war without knowing the deeper meaning of the situation? That’s what Vonnegut didn’t want to connect with his views. Vonnegut uses tactics to put the readers into a different dimension than the normal approach such as, using literal terms to bring life into a situation that doesn’t normally have light shed upon. Into much simple terms, war does not make boys into men. But it turns into much more devastating results. And depicts how a mature situation can’t turn boys into men but into mentally ill individuals. "He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next."(Vonnegut 23). These young

Vonnegut calls upon his personal experiences to create his breakthrough work, Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut expresses his own feeling on war, family, and free will through the non-linear narrative of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. His experience as a soldier and death within his family are mirrored into Pilgrim’s character.

Vonnegut explains that people only notice when they are unhappy. They do not seem to notice the good things happening around them. Many people take the small things for granted. In an interview, Vonnegut talked about his “good uncle”. This man always pointed out the moments when the people around him were happy, or content (PBS NOW Transcript). He respected his uncle for this outlook on things. That people only understand what happiness is like after it is gone. He tells about the life or death situations that the soldiers are faced with on a daily basis when fighting in a war. Vonnegut agreed with his uncle on his view of happiness, and how it was ignored. In Slaughterhouse – Five, he says “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” (Slaughterhouse – Five). Vonnegut thought that war was not an important factor of life (PBS NOW Transcript).

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.

One of the most reoccurring discussions on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five seems to be on the meaning of the book. Straight into his

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:

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,

In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a fictional character named Bill Pilgrim is used to depict the various themes about life and war. Vonnegut went through some harsh times in Dresden, which ultimately led to him writing about the tragedies and emotional effects that come with war. By experiencing the war first handed, Vonnegut is able to make a connection and relate to the traumatic events that the soldiers go through. Through the use of Billy Pilgrim and the other characters, Vonnegut is able show the horrific affects the war can have on these men, not only during the war but after as well. From the very beginning Vonnegut portrays a strong sense of anti-war feelings, which he makes most apparent through Billy Pilgrim.

Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Slaughterhouse-Five, an antiwar book that took 23 years to write, is not what he thought it would be. He explained early on to

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,

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