Essay On Slaughterhouse Five

769 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Impact of World War II

One of the most devastating and forgotten battles of World War II was the battle of Dresden. The book Slaughterhouse Five, narrated by Kurt Vonnegut, attempts to describe the war and its destructiveness. The war provides no advantages to the lives of soldiers and in some ways destroys the mind of the soldier as well. Billy after the war is deceptively successful. He has a good job and a family, while in reality he has no connection with his kids, and most of the time cannot express what is on his mind. The destructiveness of war shown throughout the book causes much harm to the lives of civilians and soldiers after the war. Trauma is one of the most severe effects of the war described in the book. Billy shows many examples of his altered mind due to the war. His experiences with the Tralfamadorians show the effects that war can have on a soldier’s mind. He gains the ability to time travel and go to the planet Tralfamadore which can see into the fourth dimension. “ He told about having come unstuck …show more content…

He has seen so much death all through the war and the bombing of Dresden. In Slaughterhouse Five whenever any living thing dies because of the war, medical reasons or accident the first comment by Billy is “So it goes”. “The real Iron Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a sort of boiler which was shaped like a women on the outside-and lined with spikes. The front of the women was composed of two hinged doors. The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly. There were two special spikes where his eyes would be. There was a drain at the bottom to let out all the blood. So it goes” (36). One of the most gruesome deaths described in the book has no emotional effect on Billy. The war wipes out the sentimental mindset of death from the minds of Billy and others who experience the destructiveness in

Show More
Related

  • Billy Pilgrim's Coping Mechanism for PTSD in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

    1243 Words  | 3 Pages

    When Billy Pilgrim goes to war in Germany, he is soon captured by the Germans and taken to a prisoner camp. While there, he is mocked and ridiculed. He is a very passive character, and so is not bothered by this taunting, but when Billy realizes that the war doesn’t just affect soldiers and people, but all animals, such as the horses they find after the bombing of Dresden, his life is scarred forever. He sees that the horses are bleeding from their mouths and that they are in agony when walking. When Billy sees that his colleagues had mistreated the horses, he realizes that that is what war does to the entire world. Billy is forever changed and even weeps (197). This may have been the trigger for PTSD in Billy’s life to begin with.

    Read More

  • Slaughterhouse Five By Kurt Vonnegut: Literary Analysis

    614 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut, war and life are two very important aspects. The war that is taking place during this time period in Slaughterhouse Five is World War II. Being in the war can affect many different people in different ways for the good, or for the bad. The war has an affect on two men named Billy Pilgrim, and Eliot Rosewater.

    Read More

  • Free Slaughterhouse-Five Essays: Dresden

    558 Words  | 2 Pages

    The focal point of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is the devastating fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, an event which was experienced by the real-life Vonnegut as well as the fictional Billy Pilgrim. Through the novel, Vonnegut renders his account of an occurrence which is, in itself, indescribable. In order to tell this story to the world, Vonnegut uses Billy Pilgrim's Tralfamadorian experience as a window that allows the reader some relief from the horrors of war. According to the author, the war was a traumatic experience which is virtually impossible to describe. As Vonnegut says in the introduction, " . . .I thought, too, that it [the novel] would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big . . .but not many words about Dresden came from my mind then"(Vonnegut 2).

    Read More

  • Billy Pilgrim Character Analysis

    639 Words  | 2 Pages

    This independent reading assignment is dedicated to Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut experienced many hardships during and as a result of his time in the military, including World War II, which he portrays through the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim. Slaughterhouse-Five, however, not only introduces these military experiences and the internal conflicts that follow, but also alters the chronological sequence in which they occur. Billy is an optometry student that gets drafted into the military and sent to Luxembourg to fight in the Battle of Bulge against Germany. Though he remains unscathed, he is now mentally unstable and becomes “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 30). This means that he is able to perceive

    Read More

  • The Life of Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade

    2034 Words  | 5 Pages

    The devastating bombing of Dresden, Germany at the close of World War II is the subject of Vonnegut's most highly acclaimed work, Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. Vonnegut's experience as an American POW in Dresden fuels the narrative that unconventionally defines his generation through the life and death of Billy Pilgrim. The survival of Billy Pilgrim at Dresden and his re-entry to the shell-shocked world reveal a modern day journey of the anti-hero. Vonnegut's unusual style and black satire provide a refreshing backdrop for a vehement anti-war theme and enhance his adept ability to depict the face of humanity, complete with all of its beauty and blemishes.

    Read More

  • Free Slaughterhouse-Five Essays: Dresden

    563 Words  | 2 Pages

    "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.

    Read More

  • Slaughterhouse-Five and the Psychological Consequences of War

    1382 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five the main character Billy Pilgrim experiences few emotions during his time in World War II. His responses to people and events lack intensity or passion. Throughout the novel Billy describes his time travel to different moments in his life, including his experience with the creatures of Tralfamadore and the bombing of Dresden. He wishes to die during most of the novel and is unable to connect with almost anyone on Earth. The fictional planet Tralfamadore appears to be Billy’s only way of escaping the horrors of war, and acts as coping mechanism. Billy seems to be a soldier with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as he struggles to express feelings and live in his reality. At the beginning of the novel the narrator proposes his reason for writing the book is to explain what happened in the Dresden fire bombing, yet he focuses on Billy’s psyche more than the bombing itself. PTSD prevents Billy from living a healthy life, which shows readers that the war does not stop after the fighting is over and the aftermath is ongoing. Billy Pilgrim’s story portrays the bombing and war in a negative light to readers, as Vonnegut shows the damaging effects of war on an individual, such as misperception of time, disconnect from peers, and inability to feel strong emotions, to overall create a stronger message.

    Read More

  • Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

    2383 Words  | 5 Pages

    The entire city was annihilated while 135,000 people were killed. The number of casualties is greater than those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The bombing of Dresden, Germany is why it took Kurt Vonnegut so long to write this book. The human pain and suffering is still fresh in the mind of the author twenty-three years later.

    Read More

  • Night And Slaughterhouse Five Themes

    668 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...ing about the night Dresden was bombed. He and the other guards were all in the slaughterhouse, when the bomb was dropped. He described that Dresden was one big flame, and the one flame ate everything organic, and everything that would burn. “The sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like a moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.” (Vonnegut 178). Dresden was untouched by war before the bombing, with factories, industries, and recreational facilities that were operating perfectly. After the bombing, nothing was left, everyone in the beautiful city of Dresden were dead. Billy was horrified about the fact that the AMERICANS??? Dropped the bomb, killing thousands of innocent people who has nothing to do with the war, including women and children. MORE EVIDENCE & CONCLUSION

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Kurt Vonnegut's Novel 'Slaughterhouse-Five'

    754 Words  | 2 Pages

    Someone breaks something? So it goes. Somebody dies? So it goes. Throughout Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse-five”, “so it goes” was stated 106 times expressing the general sense of acquiescence to the way things are. The author made that the catchphrase to show that bad things that occur should be accepted, because there is nothing that can be done to change it, bringing in the idea of fate. Vonnegut made very big examples of using “so it goes” with people that went through these types of events, the Tralfamadorians that the main character Billy Pilgrim encountered, and the story from the Gideon bible that was alluded to in the novel.

    Read More

  • Analysis of Slaughterhouse-Five Antiwar Sentiments

    776 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Repetition In Slaughterhouse Five Essay

    521 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Free Will In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

    1845 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, he talks about World War II and the bombing of Dresden. He writes about this historical event through the character Billy Pilgrim, Billy is drafted into the army at age twenty-one during World War II. He is captured and sent to Luxembourg and then later Dresden as a prisoner. Throughout the novel, Vonnegut constantly ridiculous Billy. He describes Billy as a character that has no individualism and no choice in anything that happens in his life.

    Read More

  • Insanity In The Things They Carried By O. Vonnegut

    1351 Words  | 3 Pages

    However, the books present response to war in a contrasting way. The incorporation of repetition, balance, and the idea of little control of one’s fate display parallelism between Billy Pilgrim and the soldiers of The Things They Carried while still distinguishing the existing psychological and internal contrast between them. When Billy is leading a parade in front of the Dresdeners prior to the bombing, Vonnegut

    Read More

  • Morality And Christianity In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

    2076 Words  | 5 Pages

    Edelstein has noticed that Vonnegut ties all of those instances of time travel together with Billy’s need to escape his harsh realities, but that escape can only last so long. Vonnegut would not have been able to convey this mental process of escape that Billy struggles with had he not employed the telegraphic style used in Slaughterhouse Five. Conclusion Although Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five about World War II and the Dresden bombings, he never attempts to explain or reason why any of it had ever happened. He instead chooses to highlight the aspects of warfare that assimilate humans into apathetic machines.

    Read More

More about Essay On Slaughterhouse Five

Open Document