Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

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Recommended: Postmodern literary criticism

What makes a war story a war story? Is the truths or the lies? Or is the deaths? The lives? Slaughterhouse-Five is considered one of the greatest anti-war books of its time, the story a reflection of Kurt Vonnegut's trials and tribulations surrounding the infamous firebombing of Dresden. This American classic is also seen as an example of Post-Modern fiction. Post-Modernism revolves around resistance and is seen as a reaction against Enlightenment style thinking and otherwise Modernist approaches to literature. What better way to resist than give gritty detail of a government cover up such as the massacre of Dresden? Vonnegut's black humor along side his satiric voice, his use of fragmentation, and his application of metafiction transforms Slaughterhouse-Five into a hard-hitting piece of Post-Modern work.
One key element of Post-Modern fiction is black humor and irony. Post-Modern irony is meant to be cynical and contain an aspect that it should not be taken seriously. Vonnegut uses the phrase "so it goes" many times throughout the story in order to what you might call 'level the playing field' every time someone or something dies. An example of this is on the night of Billy Pilgrim's daughter's wedding night when Billy can't sleep. He finds a half empty bottle of champagne. "'Drink me,' it seemed to say. So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn't make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes" (Vonnegut 73). This 'death' compared to probably the biggest death in the book is unfathomable, "Nothing happened that night. It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die. So it goes" (Vonnegut 165). There is no possible way that the death of one hundred and thirty thousand people can ...

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...t's part to Billy Pilgrim's life. This creates a link to the reality that all the events in this book really did happen before the magical realism is introduced in the story. Also, the Tralfamadorians can be seen as Vonnegut sharing his beliefs when it comes to life, death, existence, and time. In Billy's second letter to the Illium News Leader, he writes, "The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist" (Vonnegut 27). For a man who has experienced so much death that it no longer fazes him, Vonnegut's view of never truly being dead is something that he has most likely adapted in order to not dwell too much on all of the death that he's seen.

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