What Are The Consequences Of Slaughterhouse Five

In order to illustrate the devastating affects of war, Kurt Vonnegut afflicted Billy Pilgrim with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which caused him to become “unstuck in time” in the novel. Billy Pilgrim illustrates many symptoms of PTSD throughout the story. Vonnegut uses these Slaughterhouse Five negative examples to illustrate the horrible and devastating examples of war. The examples from the book are parallel to real life experiences of war veterans, including Vonnegut’s, and culminate in a very effective anti-war novel.

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.

Vonnegut exercised a minimal and comical style of writing to communicate his views against war. His experience in high school and

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

Kurt Vonnegut followed many principles in his writings. He claimed that “people do not realize that they are happy” (PBS NOW Transcript). Feeling that people had the wrong view on war, he felt that he needed to get the facts straight. Vonnegut believed that art can come from awful situations, and that the truth is not always easy to look at. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse – Five to tell of his experience in the bombing of Dresden, as a prisoner in war and the atrocities that occurred.

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.

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

Vonnegut knows that there will “always be wars, [and] that they were as easy to stop as glaciers” (Vonnegut 3). However, he hopes to change the perception of war in people’s minds and convince them that war is immoral. For this reason, he implies that readers should not be like Billy Pilgrim, the pathetic antihero. Billy does not tell his son about the horrors of war and allows his son to become a Green Beret, a perpetuator of war and death (Vonnegut 24). In contrast, Vonnegut, as a character in the book, instructs his sons not to “take part in massacres” and to “express contempt for people who think we need [massacre] machinery” (Vonnegut 19). Both characters know that they cannot stop war. However, while Billy passively accepts war, Vonnegut actively protests war and believes that people are morally responsible to view war as

War is a tragic experience that can motivate people to do many things. Many people have been inspired to write stories, poems, or songs about war. Many of these examples tend to reflect feelings against war. Kurt Vonnegut is no different and his experience with war inspired him to write a series of novels starting with Slaughter-House Five. It is a unique novel expressing Vonnegut's feelings about war. These strong feeling can be seen in the similarities between characters, information about the Tralfamadorians, dark humor, and the structure of the novel.

Ask a child how they would describe a soldier, they would describe them as brave, strong, and just, but unknown to these children. These valiant heroes of justice are at a ripe old age of eighteen. The media portrays soldiers in a way to make them seem like they are stoic and strong fighters that are the servants of Mother Liberty. In Vonnegut’s book, Slaughterhouse-Five, he conveys a message through the experiences of Billy Pilgrim and his pilgrimage around time and space, with the masterful use of diction and irony.Vonnegut’s message is that war is a horrific place not properly described by the media and not meant for the wrongly portrayed soldiers.

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.

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.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut explains his experience of the World War II bombing of Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut's creative antiwar novel shows the audience the hardships of the life of a soldier through his writing technique. Slaughterhouse Five is written circularly, and time travel is ironically the only consistency throughout the book. Vonnegut outlines the life of Billy Pilgrim, whose life and experiences are uncannily similar to those of Vonnegut. In Chapter 1, Kurt Vonnegut non-fictionally describes his intentions for writing the book. Vonnegut personally experienced the destruction of Dresden, and explains how he continuously tried to document Dresden but was unsuccessful for twenty-three years after the war. Vonnegut let

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, 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.