No Glory in War

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Recommended: Vonnegut’s Beliefs on War

In the name of glory, soldiers meander deep into foreign territory only to find that war is woe and hell. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut writes an antiwar novel centered on the bombing of Dresden with Billy Pilgrim as the protagonist. From his capture to his release, Billy witnesses soldiers defecate into their helmets and Dresden, the cultural center of Germany, be reduced to rubble. A baffling oddity though is that Billy, an oblivious buffoon of a soldier, walks out of the war and the bombing of Dresden with minor physical injuries, while men of all sorts die around him. Edgar Derby, a middle-aged teacher, is executed for petty thievery and Roland Weary succumbs to gangrene. Death is everywhere. Vonnegut, however, refuses to glorify such deaths because war is hell. By revealing the bleak lives of the soldiers, Kurt Vonnegut asserts that war is not heroic.
Billy Pilgrim’s experience as a soldier supports Vonnegut’s assertion that war is not heroic. Billy Pilgrim is helplessly pushed around by his German captors who take mocking, deceitful pictures of him that depict America...

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