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Slaughter house five novel analysis
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A Life Worth Living in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut (1922- ) is an author with a unique
perspective on life. He sees in a vivid technicolor things in
this world that the rest of humanity may only see in black and
white. By the same token he sees life as a rather dark subject,
it's the ultimate joke at our expense (Lundquist 1). His life
experience has been one of hardship. His mother committed suicide
in 1942. Two years later he was captured by Nazis in World War
II's epic Battle of the Bulge. In 1943 he survived the massively
destructive fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. He returned with
the distinguished Purple Heart. In 1958 his sister and
brother-in-law died, leaving him to raise their children, along
with his own (Campbell 2). Despite these hardships, however, to
Vonnegut life is still worth living. It shows through in his
novels. Vonnegut utilizes black humor and irony to show many
recurring themes noted in his works which are we, as a race, must
learn to keep happy illusions over evil ones and that a soothing
lie is sometimes the best truth (Lundquist 1).
To say that Vonnegut feels life is worth living despite
the horrors of the world is to say that Vonnegut really longs for
the life of his childhood. It was a life of family and good,
Midwestern upbringing. Wholesome morals like self-respect and
pacifism were fed to him along with other staples of the Midwest.
America was an idealistic, pacifistic nation at the
time. I was taught in the sixth grade to be proud that we
had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and
that generals had nothing to say about what was done in
Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck” in time. The question here is, why? The fact of the matter is that he does not actually begin to time-travel. Billy “becomes unstuck” as a coping mechanism to deal with his traumatic experiences during the war. Billy attempts to reorganize his life’s events and cope with a disorder known as post traumatic stress (PTSD).
Relationships and Interdependence in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut While on the surface Kurt Vonnegut's works appear to singularly contain the pessimistic views of an aging, black humorist, his underlying meanings reveal a much more sympathetic and hopeful glimpse of humanity that lends itself to eventual societal improvement. As part of Vonnegut's strategy for enhanced communal welfare, the satirist details in the course of his works potential artificial family groups to connect the masses and alleviate the lonely.
"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.' "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions.New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age. '"Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure.
In the novel Slaughter House-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, challenges the thinking of American society by incorporating the element of satirizing materialism and the worship of objects as an inadequate source of meaning for life. The theme of materialism arises often in the text and can be interpreted as a delightful purpose of life for many characters that are all commonly corrupt and discontented. Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran who was in the city of Dresden when the destruction of Dresden occurred, seems to have a different outlook on how life is structured and what really matters. Although like most other characters Billy himself too gets ridiculed by Vonnegut’s subtle satire on materialism. After the war Billy is an optometrist and is living reasonably well in a Georgian home in Ilium. Residing in the city of Ilium where the General Forge and Foundry Company is, safety goggles are high in demand and Billy says, “Frames are where the money is” (Vonnegut 24) referring to how the profession can result in having a high income. Talking about the optometry business in general, it brings in a good about of revenue because when patients receive eyeglasses, the tendency for your vision to fluctuate increases and you have to keep going back to get new frames with your new prescription. This also refers to the materialistic aspect and how certain individuals have to always have the newest, in this sense referring to the newest frames. He was making over sixty thousand dollars a year, gave his wife stylish gifts, and drove and Cadillac. Despite having all of these possessions, “Billy’s home was empty” (Vonnegut 61) Materialistic dependencies are a distraction from compassionate ideals that are focused more around social aspects of relatio...
Vonnegut's writing style throughout the novel is very flip, light, and sarcastic. The narrator's observations and the events occurring during the novel reflect a dark view of humanity which can only be mocked by humor. At the beginning of the novel the narrator is researching for a book he is writing. The book was to be about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the lives of the people who created the bomb. The narrator travels through the plot of the story, with characters flying in and out, in almost a daze. He is involved in events which are helplessly beyond his control, but which are inevitably leading to a destination at the end.
Having PTSD or somebody you know having PTSD is a very scary and dangerous disorder to have. In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim is a main character in the story who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a disorder that some people have because either they have seen or lived through a scary terrifying dangerous event in their lives. If a person has PTSD they feel afraid before and after a traumatic situation that happens. Some people feel scared even they aren’t in danger. In the book Slaughterhouse Five Billy Pilgrim says that he has come “unstuck in time”. Billy is suffering from PTSD because he gets nightmares, flashbacks from his past and he believes the Tralfamadorians
Being an anti-war novel, his book is filled with shocking events and gruesome deaths. But Vonnegut portrays death as trivial. Every time someone dies or something bad happens, the reader might think " oh my gosh, that's awful!"
Within the complex seesaw storyline in Slaughterhouse-five, Vonnegut contributed his war experiences in the main character, Billy Pilgrim. Along with these horrific memories during World War Ⅱ , the element of time travel is evident in the novel, allowing Billy to repress these painful memories and follow the philosophy he learned on Tralfamador. Despite his nonchalant attitude towards death itself throughout the novel, Billy is an alienated individual with the philosophy that he can do nothing to change the destruction brought about by people and uses time travel to avoid seeing the human suffering that he cannot accept, brought about in Dresden,
In any case, the reader encounters much dark humor in the novel. There is a sense of an embittered humor with the Tralfamadorian phrase, "So it goes," which is repeated over 100 times in the novel. John May says that Vonnegut's purpose in repeating the phrase after each statement of death is to build its meaning with each incremental refrain (Contemporary Literary Criticism 8: 530). At first, the saying can be looked upon as funny in an ironic way. However, as one reads further, the phrase becomes irritating and irreverent. The reader cannot fathom so many deaths meaning so little. According t o Wayne McGinnis, it is most likely Vonnegut's intent to cause such feelings from the reader (Contemporary Literary Criticism 5: 468). This punctuating phrase forces the reader to look at the novel's deaths one after the other.
The concept of being "unstuck in time" refers to a person living from one moment in life to another instead of the day-to-day one we live today. The main character of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim, does just that. He travels through the time line of his life experiencing moments of it in no particular order. In a flash, time travel for Billy happens with no warning to where he will turn up next. On the night of his daughter's wedding, Billy is abducted by extra-terrestrials from the planet Tralfamadore. They enlighten him on the concept of being "unstuck in time." Their belief is that, "When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments." p.27 Audiences journeys with Billy vary as they tarry along on through this time traveling tale through Vonnegut's novel and the movie based on it. They in their own way display the concept of being "unstuck in time."
Healthcare is one of the most dynamic industries in our great nation. To truly understand just how dynamic the industry is, one needs to understand that healthcare in and of itself is a living, breathing industry that is ever changing and conforming to meet the ideals set forth from a broad group of stakeholders. When one looks at the evolution that healthcare has undergone in the past 165 years, the picture of the true dynamics of this industry is painted. One must take this evolutional history into account when looking at the next ten years in our industry. When looking at these evolutional processes, one can see that the systems have changed as our country and its people have required it to (Williams & Torrens, 2008). When looking at how this industry will change or evolve over the next decade, one can ascertain that it will be by the demands of those involved that change will come.
With the passage of the ACA in 2010, this trend of micro-step expansions of health insurance coverage relegated primarily to the public domain experienced a dramatic change as enormous expansions of both public and private health insurance occurred. The
What? When?”. This article concentrates on how dysfunctional our health care system is and areas that need to be reformed. The article starts off by pointing out about how dissatisfaction with our current health care system is widespread, but there is no consensus on how to change it. It then explains why the United States’ current health care system needs to be reformed and goes through the different areas where it can improve on. I found this article interesting because it speaks about our current healthcare system and how even if we fix one or even a few, we as a country have a poor standard for healthcare and will continually need to reform it. I appreciate the fact that it doesn’t give the illusion that healthcare can be reformed a few times and then our health care system will be perfect. By pursuing a career in the healthcare field, especially in healthcare management, I would need to know the obstacles I may face and what I should keep in mind when or if I need to support one of these reforms to provide the care my patient
Obama Affordable Care Act presents a reasonable approach to effectively address this challange by building on the current system. This new policy will implement multiple strategies that include strengthening empolyer-based coverage (pay or play), expanding and funding public coverage, and creating a new national purchasing pool offering a range of health plan options for individuals and businesses. Although expanding pulic coverage sounds a great way to cover a huge number of people, it will impose two problems. The first one will be obtaining enough funding resorces, and second will be providing equal and fair health care services to all Americans. Otherwise this will be a different form of socializing medicine where beneficiaries will have very lousy insurane that is not accepted by many healthcare providers and will leave people on a long waiting lists to get any medical service.
Bolton J. R., (1977), Solat Power and Fuels, New York, San Francisco, London, (by) ACADEMIC PRESS, INC