The effects of war are devastating for those who experience it. The wake of destruction left behind by bloody conflicts can traumatize any onlooker; those who face the fighting firsthand are often permanently affected by the horrors they witness. Frequently, combatants require special treatment for the psychological torment that can follow intense fighting. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores the harmful effects of isolation, imprisonment, and oppression through a soldier’s perspective. Sections of Vonnegut’s novel take place during World War II: the bloodiest war ever fought. The story follows Billy Pilgrim, a young man who is forced to fight overseas despite the rough conditions he will face. Billy joins his regiment as “it [is] in the process of being destroyed by Germans” (Vonnegut 40), and Vonnegut’s description of Billy accentuates his lack of preparation. He is given very little combat training, ill-fitting clothes, and is not even supplied with a firearm (Vonnegut 41). From the beginning, Billy is isolated from the other troops in a way because he is not as well prepared as the others. During a scouting mission after the devastating Battle of the Bulge, Billy is separated from his group and left with another scout, Roland Weary. This is when Billy’s physical isolation begins, chronologically speaking. Billy and Roland inadvertently separate themselves from their squadron and begin to wander around behind enemy lines. Unlike Roland, however, Billy seems to
Where innumerous catastrophic events are simultaneously occurring and altering the mental capability of its viewers eternally, war is senseless killing. The participants of war that are ‘fortunate’ enough to survive become emotionally distraught civilians. Regardless of the age of the people entering war, unless one obtains the mental capacity to witness numerous deaths and stay unaffected, he or she is not equipped to enter war. Kurt Vonnegut portrays the horrors of war in Slaughterhouse Five, through the utilization of satire, symbolism, and imagery.
The novel, Slaughterhouse Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut incorporates complex ideas such as the destructiveness of war, the insignificance of time, and the morality of suffering through his first-hand experience of the cruelty of bloodshed in World War II. Desperation dictates the actions of society as the desire of survival urges the importance of crucial decision-making. The fictional world of the Tralfamadorians, the struggle faced by patriotic war soldiers, and the uneasiness among the civilians attempt to pursue the beautifulness of life within perplexing situations. The absence of free will alleviates tormentful lives.
The psychological effects, the mentality of fighting and killing another human, and the sheer decimation of human values is what makes war atrocious. War is not only fought on the battlefield though. This book also describes the feelings of a soldier fighting his own demons that war has brought on. The battle that the soldier has with himself, is almost if not more damaging than the physical battle of war. He will never forget his experience with battle, no matter how hard he tries the memories of artillery, blood, and death cannot be erased. “I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget.” (Sledge). This struggle still happens to soldiers today. Sledge’s words of the struggles still captures the effects of warfare that lingers today. The other effects that war has on the men is the instability that surrounds them at every hour of the day. They are either engaged in battle having bullets and artillery fired at them, or waiting for battle just so they can be deposited back in the pressure cooker of survival. “Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.”
War can destroy a man both in body and mind for the rest of his life. In “The Sniper,” Liam O’Flaherty suggests the horror of war not only by presenting its physical dangers, but also by showing its psychological effects. We are left to wonder which has the longer lasting effect—the visible physical scars or the ones on the inside?
War can be very traumatizing and can have extreme last longing effects on the people who are involved in it, one of those effects can be post-traumatic stress disorder. Soldiers suffering from Post-traumatic stress disorder have to live everyday with problems that most people do not have to deal with, much like various symptoms that include change in mood, behavior and mental state. The unbearing pain experienced within PTSD can lead the person to distance themselves away from close friends and family members. Being alone can have an even greater negative effect on the mind and even the body. Much like the experiences Billy Pilgrim, a victim of PTSD, went through because of the war. Isolation is also a major theme in Slaughterhouse Five.
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
Regardless of the angle in which Slaughterhouse-Five is approached, there is no escaping the destructive properties of warfare the book entails. The novel chronicles Billy Pilgrim, a New York man who has become “unstuck in time.” As a result, the narrative is structured in sections, jumping back and forth through time and space. Billy begins the novel a boy, already dealing with the perils of life from the bottom of a swimming pool. He grows to become a rather awkward and unattractive adolescent who enrolls in an Optometry school only to be drafted into the army during World War II. A weak youth, his battle skills land him a prisoner of war behind German lines. Throw in a nervous breakdown, morphine, brutal living conditions, and the
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's novel Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is, as suggested by the title, a novel describing a crusade that stretches beyond the faint boundaries of fiction and crosses over into the depths of defogged reality. This satirical, anti-war piece of literature aims to expose, broadcast and even taunt human ideals that support war and challenge them in light of their folly. However, the reality of war, the destruction, affliction and trauma it encompasses, can only be humanly described by the word “war” itself. Furthermore, oftentimes this term can only be truly understood by those who have experienced it firsthand. Therefore, in order to explain the unexplainable and humanize one of the most
Whether stabbed by a sword or blown apart by an IED, soldiers will still feel pain, mothers will still cry and there will still be devastation. War affects all who encounter it differently, some go mad, others face life in a wheelchair or hospital bed, very few reap the rewards that are promised. Every age and place offer examples of such individual's, expressed in a multitude of ways. Two such examples from modern American literature and film are Joe Bonham and Charlie Anderson.
Vonnegut also describes how unsuited Billy Pilgrim is to fighting: “He couldn't even walk right-kept bobbing up-and down, up-and-down, driving everybody crazy, giving their position away” (53). Vonnegut gives us an image of Billy as limping up and down and not walking in an orderly, straight manner. This contrasts with the quick, smart march often associated with soldiers. Billy Pilgrim doesn’t fit our image of who a soldier is, and Vonnegut uses his march to describe soldiers aren’t nearly as coordinated as people make them out to be. Vonnegut’s description of soldiers, show that they aren’t nearly as impeccable as one might make them out to be, and contrasts the perspective of war with the far more imperfect reality of
After a war, a nation and its citizens need to heal. It is obvious when looking at healing communities that war does damage to more than just the physical landscape. The novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut highlights destruction caused by World War II. Vonnegut explains this destruction through Billy, the main character, and shows how the war not only changes Billy's surroundings, but also the mindset he holds towards the world he is apart of. Throughout the book, the reader can see the effect of this destruction in Billy’s thought process as well as in his mental health.
As long as there has been war, those involved have managed to get their story out. This can be a method of coping with choices made or a way to deal with atrocities that have been witnessed. It can also be a means of telling the story of war for those that may have a keen interest in it. Regardless of the reason, a few themes have been a reoccurrence throughout. In ‘A Long Way Gone,’ ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ and ‘Novel without a Name,’ three narrators take the readers through their memories of war and destruction ending in survival and revelation. The common revelation of these stories is one of regret. Each of these books begins with the main character as an innocent, patriotic soldier or civilian and ends in either the loss of innocence and regret of choices only to be compensated with as a dire warning to those that may read it. These books are in fact antiwar stories meant not to detest patriotism or pride for one’s country or way of life, but to detest the conditions that lead to one being so simpleminded to kill another for it. The firebombing of Dresden, the mass execution of innocent civilians in Sierra Leone and a generation of people lost to the gruesome and outlandish way of life of communism and Marxism should be enough to convince anyone. These stories serve as another perspective for the not-so-easily convinced.
In Vonnegut’s best-selling novel entitled Slaughterhouse-five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, he displays his antiwar agenda through illuminating the absurdity of war, in combination with the disastrous effects that just such a war has upon the people who fight in it. Within the novel, we become acquainted with the character Billy Pilgrim, who as literary Critique Fatma Diwany states, despite “being neither mentally nor physically fit to be a soldier … find[s] himself drafted for military service in the second world war, taken as a POW, and witnessing a massacre that leads him to a partial loss of control over his mind” (Diwany 86). After returning home from war his mental instability manifests itself through his lost sense of time.
“Vonnegut continually undercuts our willing suspension of disbelief in Billy’s time travel by offering multiple choices for the origin of Billy’s imbalance: childhood traumas, brain damage from his plane crash, dreams, his shattering war experiences, and plain old fantasy.” (Vanderwerken, 412). Upon first reading the novel, it seems as though Billy develops his mental illness due to the horrors he witnessed during the war, i.e. 135,000 people killed in the firebombing of Dresden, but he had mental issues before he even entered the war. He lived through the most deadly bombing in history up to that point, but it didn’t cause his insanity. Instead, a nervous collapse from studying too hard did.