Kurt Vonnegut Served as a sensitive cell in the organism of American Society during the 1960's. His work alerted the public about the absurdity of modern warfare and an increasingly mechanized and impersonal society in which humans were essentially worthless and degenerated. The satirical tone and sardonic humor allowed people to read his works and laugh at their own misfortune.
Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, where he was reared. His father was an architect, as his grandfather had been. Though the family's fortune was eroded during the Depression-his father went without an architectural commission from 1929 to 1940-they were well-to-do. Kurt attended Shortridge High School, where he was the editor of the nations oldest daily high school paper, the Echo. (((high school quote)))
Vonnegut was expected to become a scientist, and when he went to Cornell in 1940, he chose, at the urging of his father, to major in chemistry. (((college quote))) "Chemistry was everything then," he said. "It was a magic word in the thirties. The Germans, of course, had chemistry, and they were going to take apart the universe and put it together again. At Cornell, he was the managing editor and columnist for its daily paper, the Sun. Among interned as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. It was here that he experienced what would later become the basis for one of his best-selling novels, Slaughterhouse-Five. "(Dresden) was the first fancy city I'd ever seen. Then a siren went off-it was February 13, 1945-and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with (animal) cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone." This experience, or rather, disaster, was the Allied firebombing of Dresden in which over 130,000 people, mostly citizens, died for no apparent reason. Despite the horror of the incident, he maintains that the experience did not change his way of thinking, but rather gave him another viewpoint from which to observe the absurdity and cruelty of the human race. "The importance of Dresden in my life has been considerably exaggerated because my book about it became a best seller." (p. 94 CWV)
Vonnegut returned to the United States determined tp be a writer, and to deal with the experience of Dresden, though it was nearly 25 years before he was able to do so.
"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.
Vonnegut's writing style throughout the novel is very flip, light, and sarcastic. The narrator's observations and the events occurring during the novel reflect a dark view of humanity which can only be mocked by humor. At the beginning of the novel the narrator is researching for a book he is writing. The book was to be about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the lives of the people who created the bomb. The narrator travels through the plot of the story, with characters flying in and out, in almost a daze. He is involved in events which are helplessly beyond his control, but which are inevitably leading to a destination at the end.
Don Marquis is a philosopher arguing that any form of abortion is immoral. His original thesis states: In the overwhelming majority of cases, deliberate abortions are seriously immoral. He begins by stating why killing is wrong in three statements. He states, “killing is wrong because it brutalizes the killer, it is a loss to others, and it robs the victim of all the experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that would otherwise have constituted one’s future” (68). The first two statements do not address the fetus, but the last statement is very arguable, so Marquis emphasizes his argument on this premise. Depriving anybody of their future has many consequences. Some parts of a person’s future are valued now and some parts could be valued later. Therefore, it is wrong to kill any adult human because it is a loss of future (which has value). He addresses the questions of personhood by stating that fetuses have the potential to be humans. Therefore, killing a fetus is depriving the fetus of having a
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five as an Antiwar Novel. War can affect and inspire people to many degrees. Kurt Vonnegut was inspired by war to write Slaughterhouse Five. which is a unique book referred to sometimes as a science fiction or semi-autobiographical novel.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a World War II veteran and author of the literary masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five, was one of the many there to witness the destruction of the city of Dresden located in Germany, and one of the few to survive to tell the gruesome details. Most of his writing was used to encourage those with anti-war mindsets to take a stand, and to inform everyone else of the damage that is done when a nation goes to war. He uses his books to remind people that war is gruesome, gory, and violent, and the glamorous aspect of it is simply a disturbed part of one’s imagination that truly does not exist. He reminds people of the visceral hatred that comes with the package of war; of how Germans used the fat of dead Jews to make soap and candles and how there was a scarce food supply for prisoners during the second World War, or possibly any war for that matter. The fire-bombing of Dresden lead to the unnecessary deaths of over 60,000 civilians and prisoners of war (POW’s). Homes, lives, and much more were destroyed and the damage was almost unfathomable. The POW’s that survived the disaster were ordered to stay behind and remove the dead bodies. Because there were so many of them and the stench was so putrid, most of the bodies were cremated by the soldiers and left exactly where they lay in a pile of ashes. Such a scene seems painful for Vonnegut to look back on and he demonstrates his distaste for such things as war with his novels, especially Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut used the story of Slaughterhouse-Five to explain the after effects of war, why a nation should never go to war, and what such violence will ultimately lead to.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana to Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and Edith Lieber Vonnegut. He had an older brother named Bernard and an older sister named Alice. Kurt, Sr. was a well-known architect in the city and Edith was the daughter of a wealthy local family. The Vonneguts had been in Indianapolis for several generations, and were well-off, respected members of the community. Unlike the characters in most of his books, Vonnegut's early childhood was extremely privileged. It wasn't until the stock market crash of 1929 that he experienced the type of life that he would go on to write about in the future: the middle Middle Class.
Marquis believes abortion to be extremely immoral. However he mentions that there are exceptions in rare but certain circumstances where abortion is acceptable. We can infer that these instances would include situations that would put the mother or child at serious risk by keeping the fetus. He is frustrated that this idea has received minimal support recently. As a result he wants to influence change in society in hopes of receiving the support and publicity this topic deserves. Marquis’ primary argument stems from the idea of killing in general. He explains it is immoral to kill an adult because it prematurely deprives the human of something they may have valued at the time they were killed, as well as something they may had valued in the future. Although the victim may not realize it at the time of their death, they certainly had a valuable future ahead of them to experience which has been cut short. We are the only ones who can decide what is valuable to them; in this case we value some things more than others, and this concept differs from person to person. For example, in the present I value the life I am given and the opportunity I have to earn my degree at Villanova University while also valuing my future as well knowing that I have a chance to be successful in the future. Although I have not succeeded yet, I still value that opportunity I have and the life I’m capable of achieving through earning a degree. Therefore, he connects this same theory to the life of a fetus. By killing the fetus the result is the same, we are depriving it of its futur...
Simpson, Josh. “‘This Promising of Great Secrets’: Literature, Ideas, and the (Re)Invention of Reality in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions Or ‘Fantasies of an Impossibly Hospitable World’: Science Fiction and Madness in Vonnegut’s Troutean Trilogy.” Critique 45.3 (2004): 261-71. Print.
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.
Thirdly, Marquis concludes from the last two premises and says that if you kill a fetus then it is prima facie seriously morally wrong of you. By killing off a human being’s potential values it is cruel, especially to children because they are defenseless. Then, Marquis asserts that if fetuses and adults are in the same moral categories then the fetus can only be aborted if there is a serious moral concern. In the beginning, Marquis proclaims that there are special cases like rape and the mom’s life being threatened that it would override the “moral wrongness” of abortion. So if the premises that Marquis stated above are all true then we ought to accept his conclusion. The first premise expresses that if you kill someone then one is taking away from his or her future like ours. Marquis statement on the first premise is one we ought to accept because obviously if the person is dead they cannot have a future like ours. The
Vonnegut had tremendous difficulty writing this novel. He says, "I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen" (Vonnegut 2). He did not count on his emotions interfering with his attempts at a factual and logical report of such atrocities. It took Vonnegut twenty years to directly face his private demon of the firebombing of Dresden in the form of this novel. He had trouble recalling any memories of substance about his time in Dresden. It could be said that he was blinded by the firebombs of Dresden. It was not until Vonnegut returned to the sight of the bombing twenty years later, along with one of his war buddies, that he was able to recall the disastrous and horrific incidents in Dresden. The novel served as a form of therapy for Vonnegut; it enabled him to examine the events of the past that impacted on his life, and to come to terms with them. Vonnegut chooses to focus the novel on events surrounding the firebombing of Dresden, Germany. As James Lundquist explains:
Marquis’s argument that it is immoral to kill, and abortion is wrong because it deprives one of a valuable future has a lot of problems in my eyes that does not make his view on anti-abortion solid. The lack of arguments that do not raise questions that seem to go unanswered make it hard to be persuaded to change a pro-abortionist mind or even be open to understanding where Marquis’s arguments lead. His “what if” argument leaves room for anyone opposing to “what if” in any direction which is not grounds for an effective argument and hurts Marquis’s because a lot of the questions go unanswered in his essay.
...t,” or the second consideration, is that there is no empirical way of deducing what the fetus’s future existence will be like, and we are back to working under the same sort of broad assumptions he considers a problem with the current pro-choice/anti-abortionist paradigm. I do agree that Marquis is correct when he says that these broad and narrow assumptions bring us difficulty in solving the problem; I do not agree with the solution that he proposes. He has, however, managed to provide a much less problematic approach to the entire situation as his method of deductive reason produces a more logically valid response than either side of the divide with the current abortion argument, but it is only slightly more epistemologically respectable than the current arguments, as they all utilize internal knowledge in place of empiricism at some point or another (Chisolm 3).
The author Don Marquis wants to prove that abortion is immoral without taking into consideration extreme cases, while Thomson says that abortion is justified in some cases. Clearly killing is so wrong but Marquis argument avoids the ambiguity of why abortion happened. I strongly believe that it is not fair to compare a fetus’ life with an adult. Marquis 's ethical approach is general, because he says that abortion is ethically similar to committing a crime by killing somebody. While Thompson supports her arguments by saying that abortion is justified in cases such as rape and when the mother 's life, which is the most important here, is in danger. I agree that everyone has the right to life and it is immoral and so unethical to deprive that right from anyone. However, abortion is justified in some cases, which is the best possible option available for the mother. I strongly believe that ethics and religion plays a vital role in making such a decision because abortion is forbidding in some religions such as Islam, abortion is not acceptable after eight weeks of pregnancy. Another possible reason why abortion can’t be performed is because of the law of some countries such as Egypt that reject abortion and consider it as a crime that a mother might face some time in prison. So there are a lot more into this argument that needs more
Would you want someone to take away the ability to live from you? Or can you imagine not having this life? Babies or Embryos, on the other hand, don’t have any choices like you under the mother’s womb. They can’t resist or even stand up for themselves, if the mother decides to get an abortion. Abortion is an option given to women who become pregnant. Many consider it, and many decide to have one. They believe that it is their right to choose whether or not abortion is right for them, and the baby is just helpless. Their whole future has vanished from this world. Considering the Marquis’ arguments on abortion, syllogism, and some philosophy like Kantian, I believe that abortion is immoral.