Vonnegut's Novel 'Poo-Tee-Weet'

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five he talks about many different themes. He quotes, makes fun of, and uses many different themes. I would like to talk about one major theme in Slaughterhouse Five, religion. In the book he uses religion to teach important lessons, he used it as inspiration, and he even pokes fun at religion.

Every so often, a person comes along and encompasses the meaning of a generation. This person will capture everything people want to say, and then word it so well that his or her name becomes legendary. The sixties was an era with many of these people, each with his or her own means of reaching the people. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., armed with a typewriter and a motive, was amongst those that defined the sixties. Like other notable figures of the sixties, his strong opinions moved the people. Vonnegut’s opinions cover a wide range of topics and address almost all aspects of society. He represented the flower children of the sixties, as he

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

The book titled Slaughterhouse-Five written by Kurt Vonnegut was assigned to us the class of 2017 from High Tech High School. Kurt who is the author of this book was a descendant of German-American families. He enlisted for the U.S. army while he attended the college of Cornell. He was taken prisoner of the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium. Eventually he got married and was part of the anthropology program at the University of Chicago. He finally just dedicated himself to full-time writing.

Kurt Vonnegut, was born on November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, to American-German parents Kurt Vonnegut (Sr.), and Edith Vonnegut. Vonnegut had an older brother, Bernard and an older sister, Alice. Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1940 and went to Cornell University later that fall. Though he majored in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of the Cornell newspaper. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the United States Army. The Army then transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and finally the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

True, the world isn’t perfect but it shouldn’t have to be. We are humans and we make mistakes. Sometimes we wish everything could be perfect but that may end up making it worse. We shouldn’t try to be perfect like Dr. Hitz thinks it should be. We should just be thankful for what we have now. In “2BRO2B,” Kurt Vonnegut uses characterization and internal conflict to stress the idea sometimes things aren’t as perfect as they seem.

    Cat's Cradle is, "Vonnegut's most highly praised novel. Filled with humor and unforgettable characters, this apocalyptic story tells of Earth's ultimate end, and presents a vision of the future that is both darkly fantastic and funny, as Vonnegut weaves a satirical commentary on modern man and his madness" (Barnes and Noble n.pag).  In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut uses satire as a vehicle for threatened self-destruction when he designs the government of San Lorenzo.  In addition, the Bokonists practice of Boko-maru, and if the world is going to end in total self destruction and ruin, then people will die, no matter how good people are and what religion people believe.

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.

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

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..

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".

A known problem in today’s society is the tendency to avoid problems by ignoring them. This has been mocked and satirized by the media, studied by scientists, and become an almost humorous staple in modern culture. However, none of the reactions to this problem have come close to solving it. In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut tell the story of a war veteran, Billy Pilgrim, who jumps around time and is kidnapped by an alien race called the Tralfamadorians. He delves into themes of war and morality while offering a look into the mind of veterans after they return from war and how it affects them. Vonnegut explores humanity’s destruction of the Earth with a similar morbid yet dryly humorous approach in his poem Requiem. In both texts, Vonnegut

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.

Slaughterhouse-Five (from now on shown as SH5) is a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, that addresses his experience in the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets”(from now on shown as “Wailing”), is an essay written by Kurt Vonnegut that addresses the same thing. Although they discuss the same topic, SH5 takes a different approach when describing the firebombing in Dresden. SH5 has science-fiction infused in the novel, while Vonnegut's essay is more straightforward when talking about the events that occured in Dresden. And although both works talk about the bombing, “Wailing” better describes Vonnegut’s goal for writing about his time in war, his goal being that he wanted to show how terrible and immoral the war was, due to its tone and diction.

Many veterans in our time come back from war a completely different person than before. The experiences of trauma that military individuals endure are not spoken of enough, if at all. Vonnegut speaks about the multiple situations he encountered during his time serving and Slaughterhouse Five represents the turmoil that circled within his mind caused by war. Vonnegut utilizes an anti-war theme to demonstrate how war can have detrimental impacts on veterans for the rest of their lives. Vonnegut starts Chapter 1 in a strong manner exposing the alcoholism that Billy Pilgrim has fallen to, to escape the traumatic thoughts he faces.