Slaughterhouse-Five Reader’s Response
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is an anti-war book, focusing on the bombing in Dresden, Germany, and the author’s experience as a POW in WWII. Usually, a book with this theme would be difficult to read thoughtfully; it would be full of idealized war heroes, who saved hundreds of people from the “enemies.” Slaughterhouse Five is a book focusing on the less glamorous side of war. By focusing on his own experiences and not the main picture as most novels focusing on war do, I was able to connect more with some characters and themes.
A typical book about war would focus on the heroes and victories, like Odysseus in the Odyssey, but Vonnegut focused on a Prisoner of War and those with him, who didn’t have
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Kurt Vonnegut is not embellishing--he is retelling his experience. Instead of describing the bombing of Dresden as an amazing explosion, he describes how the main character fell asleep in a meat locker, and when he woke up, Dresden looked “like the moon”(178). Along with surreal descriptions like of the bombing, there were also more distressing events like the aftermath of the attacks. Moments like these highlighted what the author wanted to get across; the difference between this book and others is the grounded, simpler tone. The book was much more focused on the events before and after the action than many of the films and movies today. Kurt Vonnegut leads up to the bombing by describing the Germans who saved the main character from freezing, the POW camp he was sent to, then being sent to work in Dresden, and all the people he met on the way. Then, he describes the event in two pages. Afterward, he spends more time focusing on the cleanup efforts, and how different people reacted and the consequences of the bombings, all the civilians that were killed. Blockbusters focus on the heroes, not on the people the heroes killed. This book focused on how the war affected everyone. There was no good or bad. This gave the book a more unifying theme, that everyone was being destroyed by war. I am not patriotic, and I think that everybody is not always right, so I can find that
a prisoner of war (POW) in Dresden, Germany. During that time he experienced the firebombing of Dresden, which affected him greatly. This event had around 135,000. casualties, which is about twice the number killed in Hiroshima by the atomic bomb (1969 Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse (Five) -.. Many claim that his involvement in the war is what made him write Slaughterhouse Five.
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.
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!"
Thesis: In this anti-war novel, Vonnegut, showed the negative sides of war using characterization, symbolism, plot, point of view, and motif. In the first chapter alone the author shows many signs of his writing being an anti-war story. One of the first signs is used with characterization of other characters. This was effective considering he showed the effects of war on the veterans. For example, O’Hare couldn’t drink after the war and I believe Vonnegut made a point to express the effects to add to the anti-war theme. This is also shown in the point of view by him being able to express his experiences. The author also showed by his characterization that war changed him from a young boy to a man that had seen horrific
Vonnegut uses irony very often to strengthen the readers’ contempt for war. Edgar Derby, the well-liked high sc...
A transport for expression and information, but conversely can convey the opposite. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. intended Slaughterhouse-Five to act as his semi-realistic commentary on his experiences in the Firebombing of Dresden; to blend fact and fiction seamlessly into a single publication. Though Vonnegut achieves this, he brings Slaughterhouse-Five to the point where the boundary between the two becomes fuzzy, and suffers a hit to his own credibility as a result, both in universe and in the real world. His allusions to events in the story, factual errors, and the conflicting rules of his own universe cast Vonnegut in a bad light.
Vonnegut includes topics of war and violence in his work in order to explain his opinions on such conflicts. “After this battle, Kurt Vonnegut was captured and became a prisoner of war. He was in Dresden, Germany, during the allied firebombing of the city and saw the complete devastation caused by it” (Biography.com). This helps explain my thesis because it shows the hardships Vonnegut
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.
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, uses the biblical allusion of Lot’s wife looking back on the destroyed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to parallel the story of Billy Pilgrim during the war and his experience after, when he returns to the United States. Although the reference is brief, it has profound implications to the portrayal of America during World War II, especially the bombing of Dresden. Although Lot’s wife’s action dooms her to turn into a pillar of salt, the narrator emphasizes her choice to indicate the importance of being compassionate and having hindsight. Ultimately, Slaughterhouse-Five critiques the American social attitude to disregard the unjust nature of its actions in World War II. Furthermore, Vonnegut’s novel explicates this by elucidating the horrors of war—especially in regard to the massacre of innocence, how it leaves the soldiers stagnant when they return home, and leaves them empty with an American Dream that cannot be fulfilled. In order to combat violence, the novel stresses that one must hold human life to a higher value and be compassionate towards others; America must acknowledge its mistakes so that the soldiers who fought and died for her so that the soldiers may move on.
Slaughterhouse-Five is mainly about the harmfulness of war. Not about the war in general, Vonnegut specifically focuses on prisoners of war and how the privilege of being in control of what they do and where they go was viciously taken away from them. The initial detriment of war is its destruction of the world, but the greater damage that war leaves is the lasting effect on the people who had to live through all the
Tanner, Tony. “The Moral Problem of Billy's Fantasies.” War in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Greenhaven Press, 2011, pp.
Slaughterhouse-Five displays many themes. However, there is a dispute as to whether the book is an anti-war novel or not. Slaughterhouse-Five, the character Kurt Vonnegut explains to Mary O’Hare, is intended to be an anti-war novel, and he says that it shall also be called The Children’s Crusade because of the effect it had on young men who fought in the war. Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war novel because Vonnegut, the character, says it is in the first chapter, because it depicts the terrible long-term effects the war has on Billy, and because it exposes war's devastating practices.
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
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.
"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.