Vonnegut's Wailing Shall Be In All Streets

When British and American forces raided the city with firebombs, Vonnegut and his fellow captives were saved due to their underground imprisonment. The bombing killed more than 135,000 people, most of whom were innocent civilians, more than the deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. After the bombing, Vonnegut was given the morbid task of carrying the corpses from Air-Raid shelters, including women, children, and the elderly; dead from concussions, fire, or suffocation. In a letter to his father, Vonnegut described his job and the reaction of the locals, “Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge pyres in the city,” (Boomhower). His distressing internment in Dresden not only furthered his anti-war sentiments, but also established a reoccurring theme in his books: the irrationality of government and the senselessness of war. Vonnegut saw the bombing of Dresden and the slaughter of innocents as wasteful and meaningless. He could not comprehend the purpose of destroying a “beautiful” and fully functional civilization (Wiswell 5). The annihilation of the city and lives of the innocent affirmed his views of war as a waste, and even lead to his feeling that, “civilization ended in World War I” (Vitale). This view indicated Vonnegut believed World War II was a meaningless act committed by the uncivilized.

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.

SlaughterHouse-Five is an antiwar novel written by Kurt Vonnegut. SlaughterHouse-Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim’s capture and imprisonment by the Germans during the last, few years of World War II. Billy comprises the ability to travel forwards and backwards in his lifetime. Therefore the novel contains scattered memories of Billy’s life before and after the war. Along with many moments of Billy’s time travel, the novel constantly goes into his journey to the so-called planet, “Tralfamadore” as well. SlaughterHouse-Five centers around the topic of the Dresden Bombing. As a witness, Billy becomes flustered and questions himself about the meanings of life and death. Although he had so many different roles in his life, because of the trauma he possessed in Dresden, he cannot find peace in his mind.

It takes and ruins peoples lives in many ways for no reason. It has been going on for many years and will still be going on throughout the history of humanity. In the novel Slaughterhouse five, by Kurt Vonnegut,Vonnegut illustrates the impact on humans that war gives by using historical allusions emphasizing the absurdity and horror of it. Vonnegut illustrates the human aspect by using historical allusions to World War 2. Vonnegut vividly depicts the firebombing of Dresden throughout the novel from a third person perspective of Billy Pilgrim, who is a prisoner of war in

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.

And his printed pace even feels filmic, as he packs his scenes tightly together, butting them against each other for maximum, often jarring, effect" (42). Slaughterhouse-Five, as the title page points out, is written by "a fourth-generation German-American" who fought as "an American infantry scout" and who "as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden ... and survived to tell the tale. " It is a "novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner

Vonnegut himself was actually present for the firebombing of Dresden during WWII as is noted by Woo, explaining, “Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and wound up in a prisoner work group in Dresden” (Woo 1). She goes on to chronicle its destruction stating “Dresden was hit by successive waves of British and American bombers, which destroyed the city's extraordinary architecture and art treasures and killed at least 60,000 people and perhaps as many as 200,000 -- more than in the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined” (Woo 1). Vonnegut describes it in Slaughterhouse-Five as “the greatest massacre in European history” (Vonnegut 101). Ironically, Billy survives the bombing by hiding in a meat locker, a place used to keep the dead bodies of animals.

Many writers in history have written science fiction novels and had great success with them, but only a few have been as enduring over time as Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five is a personal novel which draws upon Vonnegut's experience's as a scout in World War Two, his capture and becoming a prisoner of war, and his witnessing of the fire bombing of Dresden in February of 1945 (the greatest man-caused massacre in history). The novel is about the life and times of a World War Two veteran named Billy Pilgrim. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut uses structure and point of view to portray the theme that time is relative.

He has situated the book in a fashion that it is not chronological, has isn't linear, is fictional and non-fictional, and maintains the same satirical voice throughout. The style makes the reader think there is no plot line, and that Vonnegut is freelance writing, however his work was greatly thought out, for twenty-three years actually. Vonnegut's constant confusion about the war and circular thoughts left few options for techniques in which he could tell his story.

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

Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut’s commentary on war. While the main focus is the bombing of Dresden during World War II, the book isn’t really about Dresden; Vonnegut merely uses this specific battle as a method to express his strong sentiment against war in general. In the early part of the novel, Vonnegut narrates his visit to Bernard O’Hare’s home. O’Hare’s wife, Mary suddenly launches into an angry outburst after mumbling to herself for a time, and Vonnegut says “She [Mary O’Hare] had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation” (Vonnegut 18). Likewise, Vonnegut’s reference to the Children’s Crusade and his use of it as the alternative title for the book is a fragment of a much larger

Many people returned from World War II with disturbing images forever stuck in their heads. Others returned and went crazy due to the many hardships and terrors faced. The protagonist in Slaughter-House Five, Billy Pilgrim, has to deal with some of these things along with many other complications in his life. Slaughter House Five (1968), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is an anti-war novel about a man’s life before, after and during the time he spent fighting in World War II. While Billy is trying to escape from behind enemy lines, he is captured and imprisoned in a German slaughterhouse. The author tells of Billy’s terrible experiences there. After the war, Billy marries and goes to school to

War is the third topic that is heavily satirized in Slaughterhouse Five. First, Billy almost gets killed because he is time-traveling. Second of all, Vonnegut always says “so it goes” (12) whenever someone dies, so it sort of mocks death. Also, he is given a woman’s jacket when he becomes a POW and it mocks his position in the war also. On the nights of February 13-14 in 1944 the city of Dresden, Germany was subjected to one of the worst air attacks in the history of man. By the end of the bombing 135,000 to 250,000 people had been killed by the combined forces of the United States and the United Kingdom. Dresden was different then Berlin or many of the other military targets which were attacked during World War II because it was never fortified or used for strategic purposes and, therefore, was not considered a military target. At one point, Billy watches a war movie about WWII. He watches it regularly, showing how reality is.

Kurt Vonnegut did a great job in writing an irresistible reading novel in which one is not permitted to laugh, and yet still be a sad book without tears. Slaughterhouse-five was copyrighted in 1969 and is a book about the 1945 firebombing in Dresden which had killed 135,000 people. The main character is Billy Pilgrim, a very young infantry scout who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered to a slaughterhouse where he and other soldiers are held. The rest of the novel is about Billy and his encounters with the war, his wife, his life on earth, and on the planet Tralfamador.

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