Human Nature

Human Nature

For hundreds of years people have written countless books about war.

Some have chosen to write simply about the events that took place

during the war, in the form a historical account, while others have

chosen to write about their own, or other people's experiences.

However, many of them have portrayed war as being glorious and

associated it with valor and honor, suggesting that all participants

of war were heroes. In a way these kinds of writings were encouraging

warfare by depicting the act of war and its partakers as being

admirable. On the contrary, Slaughterhouse- Five written by Kurt

Vonnegut is an anti-war book. Not only does it reveal the horrors of

war, but it also suggests that the 'heroes' are in fact mere children

doing what they have been instructed to do. The combatants are

depicted as weak, vulnerable and very much human, unlike the

exaggerated superheroes of typical war novels.

The theme of the passage is that even though time and death are two

concepts that are beyond the control of human beings, people still try

to overcome them, oblivious to the fact that there would be no life

without death. The author Kurt Vonnegut uses literary features such as

allusion and irony to emphasize on the theme.

The setting of the passage is in a motel room where the narrator has

to spend the night after the plane, which was supposed to take him to

Frankfurt, goes there straight from Philadelphia, leaving him and a

number of other people behind in Boston. This takes place while the

narrator is still writing the book. The narrator addresses the reader

through first person narration indirectly revealing to him, ...

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...ople of Sodom and Gomorrah, he uses

irony. "Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known.

The world was better of without them" (21). The narrator makes it seem

as though their deaths were justified since they were nasty and

horrible people, who were not worthy of living anyway. What the

narrator is really trying to do is convince himself that what happened

was all right, so that he can accept it and move on. The narrator also

uses irony when he uses the excerpt from the Death on the Installment

Plan. In the passage, Celine wants the people to stop moving and

freeze, in order to stop them from dying. However, what he doesn't

realize is that if he freezes them, they will not be living either.

The narrator is once again trying to convey to the reader the message

that there would be no life without death.