Christian Baxter
11th Advanced English
C. Ellison
December 8, 2017 The Theme Differences of Kurt Vonnegut JR “SlaughterHouse-Five” and “Jailbird”
Kurt Vonnegut is grand writer all around. People from all over the world enjoy his book. Such as “Cat's Cradle,” “Breakfast of Champions,” and “SlapStick.” Besides these I wanna talk about two special books. These books are called “Slaughterhouse-five” and “Jailbird.”
I wanna start by talking about the themes of these two books. In the story of “Slaughterhouse-five” it has a different themes within the book. For Instance one of the main themes would be Alienation and Loneliness. Alienation, among other things, a hopelessness to make connections with other people and with society
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This perception is expressed through the idea of the Tralfamadorians, for those whose time is not a straight variation of events, but a constant condition: "All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist." All beings exist in each instant of time like "bugs in amber," a fact that nothing can change. "Only on Earth is there any talk of free will." Whatever happens can not be changed. "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." Accordingly, the Tralfamadorians inform Billy "to concentrate on the happy moments of life, and to ignore the unhappy …show more content…
To me these had to be the main differences between them. Kurt Vonnegut did a very good job at showing the themes in these stories. They were very well drawn out and displayed all throughout them.
Citation:
Harris, Laurie Lanzen. "Overview: Jailbird." Characters in 20th-Century Literature, Gale, 1990. Literature Resource Center, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1430000988/GLS?u=avl_gehs&sid=GLS&xid=83f165c5. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Shear, Walter. "Kurt Vonnegut: The Comic Fate of the Sensibility." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 212, Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1100067882/GLS?u=avl_gehs&sid=GLS&xid=6ab22e7d. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017. Originally published in The Feeling of Being: Sensibility in Postwar American Fiction, Peter Lang, 2002, pp. 215-239.
Morse, Donald E. "Thinking Intelligently, Thinking Ethically about Science, Art, and War." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 254, Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1100082170/GLS?u=avl_gehs&sid=GLS&xid=fdbf17a1. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017. Originally published in The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American, Praeger, 2003, pp.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of Billy Pilgrim 's capture by the Nazi Germans during the last years of World War II. Throughout the narrative, excerpts of Billy’s life are portrayed from his pre-war self to his post-war insanity. Billy is able to move both forward and backwards through his life in a random cycle of events. Living the dull life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a provocative woman on the planet Tralfamadore, and simultaneously an American prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. While I agree with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt that Slaughterhouse-Five effectively combines fact and fiction, I argue that the book is more centralized around coping.
For a novel to be considered a Great American Novel, it must contain a theme that is uniquely American, a hero that is the essence of a great American, or relevance to the American people. Others argue, however, that the Great American Novel may never exist. They say that America and her image are constantly changing and therefore, there will never be a novel that can represent the country in its entirety. In his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut writes about war and its destructiveness. Vonnegut tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an unlikely hero, mentally scarred by World War Two. Kurt Vonnegut explains how war is so devastating it can ruin a person forever. These are topics that are reoccurring in American history and have a relevance to the American people thus making Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five a Great American Novel.
The tone of the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a mixture of candid and matter of fact, with an underlying tone of indifference and detachment. This tone is displayed throughout the chapter with Vonnegut’s use of informal language and phrases, such as the first sentence “All this happened, more or less.” He conveys this tone not only through phrases such as “and so on” or “so it goes”, but with stylistic elements with his use of punctuation, spaces, repetition, and ellipses. He uses this tone in the first chapter to set the audience up for how the rest of the novel will be written, and to display to the audience his style of writing and how it may not always be reliable.
Kurt Vonnegut's manipulation of time and place adds a science- fiction element to Slaughterhouse-Five. Structarally, the novel is far from traditional.
Festa, Conrad. “Vonnegut’s Satire.” Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Vol. 5. 1977. 133-50. The GaleGroup. Web. 10 March. 2014.
One can only imagine the intense emotional scarring that one would suffer after exiting an underground shelter with a dozen other men to find a city destroyed and its people dead, corpses laying all around. These feelings are what prompted Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse-Five as he did. The main character of this novel mirrors the author in many ways, but the striking similarity is their inability to deal with the events of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945. Section Two- Critical Commentaries Kurt Vonnegut's work is nothing new to critics, but Slaughterhouse-Five is considered to be his best work.
Meeter, Glenn. "Vonnegut's Formal and Moral Otherworldliness: Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five," in Jerome Klinkowitz & John Somer (eds.), The Vonnegut Statement. USA: Delacourte Press/ Seymour Lawrence, 1973, 204-220.
Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, provided a powerful first-hand account describing the horrific events of WWII. Vonnegut recounted the events and wrote about himself through the novels protagonists, Billy Pilgrim. He was pessimistic regarding the novel because he wrote, “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre” (Vonnegut 22). However, on the other spectrum critics considered it to be “one of the worlds greatest antiwar books”(Vonnegut Back cover). The controversial novel was published in 1969, which was over two decades after WWII. The time it took Vonnegut to write the novel is an indication of how difficult it was for him to write about the bombings. Vonnegut does not write the novel to portray the narrator as, “John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war loving, dirty old men” (Vonnegut 14). Instead, he writes about the true chaos’s the narrator endured during his time in Dresden. Vonnegut’s novel consisted of events that reflected major societal and political movements, such as civil rights movements, and antiwar movements, within the United States during the 1960s.
Slaughterhouse Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut is an anti war novel told by the narrator who is a minor character in the story. Slaughterhouse-Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has come "unstuck in time. "The bombing of Dresden is what destroyed Billy. Dresden’s destruction shows the destruction of people who fought in the war: the all the people who died. Some people, like the main character, Billy Pilgrim, are not able to function normally like before because of what they saw, because of their experience. Throughout the book, Billy starts hallucinating about his experiences with the Tralfamadorians: he wants to escape the world which was destroyed by war, a war that he does not and cannot understand. Vonnegut uses the technique of repetition.. The main repetition is “so it goes” which is told after anything related to death, he also uses other repetitions throughout the book. The major theme of the story is the Destructiveness of War. Vonnegut uses repetition to reinforce the theme of the story.
The people of Tralfamadore tell Billy that humans do not understand time because everything they do is in singular progression. “It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever,” (27). The Tralfamadorians also tell Billy that nothing can be changed because of the structure of how time works. When Billy asks one of the Tralfamadorians about free will the creature responds, “Only on Earth is there any talk of free will,” (86). The people of Tralfamadore say that, “All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is,” (86). With this in mind everything in life is left up to fate there is no chance at free will because every moment is already a moment and no one is capable of changing
Kurt Vonnegut uses a combination of dark humor and irony in Slaughterhouse-Five. As a result, the novel enables the reader to realize the horrors of war while simultaneously laughing at some of the absurd situations it can generate. Mostly, Vonnegut wants the reader to recognize the fact that one has to accept things as they happen because no one can change the inevitable.
Slaughterhouse Five is not a book that should be glanced over and discarded away like a dirty rag. Slaughterhouse Five is a book that should be carefully analyzed and be seen as an inspiration to further improve the well-being of mankind. Vonnegut makes it clear that an easy way to improve mankind is to see war not as a place where legends are born, but rather, an event to be avoided. Intelligent readers and critics alike should recognize Vonnegut’s work and see to it that they make an effort to understand the complexities behind the human condition that lead us to war.
Throughout his career, Kurt Vonnegut has used writing as a tool to convey penetrating messages and ominous warnings about our society. He skillfully combines vivid imagery with a distinctly satirical and anecdotal style to explore complex issues such as religion and war. Two of his most well known, and most gripping, novels that embody this subtle talent are Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. Both books represent Vonnegut’s genius for manipulating fiction to reveal glaring, disturbing and occasionally redemptive truths about human nature. On the surface, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five are dramatically different novels, each with its own characters, symbols, and plot. However, a close examination reveals that both contain common themes and ideas. Examining and comparing the two novels and their presentation of different themes provides a unique insight into both the novels and the author – allowing the reader to gain a fuller understanding of Vonnegut’s true meaning.
In conclusion, Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war novel because Vonnegut, the character, says it is in the first chapter, the terrible damage it left on Billy, and how it exposes war's horrifying practices. Knowing these elements, one might wonder why people still have wars. Although these anti-war novels cannot completely stop wars, they are important. The role that such novels play is one of raising awareness of war's actions and wrongdoings. Since the role of the novels is important, authors should continue to write them to keep people informed and educated about a problem of such a huge magnitude.
The novels Jailbird and Cat’s Cradle were skillfully written by Kurt Vonnegut in the late 20th century and though he has been criticized for his works these books speak as a testament as to why he’s far above the average author. In Jailbird, Walter Starbuck is a former bureaucrat that was tied up into the Watergate Scandal and in Cat’s Cradle Jonah/John was an author trying to find out about Felix Hoenikker for his latest book and I have found that they have some striking similarities but they also have some big differences. I will discuss the power struggles, the interconnectedness, social and political structure and how people being wilfully blind either helped or damned them.