Style Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut on Slaughterhouse Five

1583 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How is slaughterhouse five anti war

Though war is a traumatizing and miserable experience, it may also be able to move and inspire people to write a brilliant piece of literature. One example, for instance, is Kurt Vonnegut who may have been stimulated by the war, thus writing Slaughterhouse – Five. Though one may categorize this piece as science fiction or even auto - biographical, it can also be interpreted as an anti – war piece. Because Vonnegut is classified as a post modernist, one can take into account all the details, such as the similarities between the main character and Vonnegut, the Tralfamadorians, and the style and themes of the novel, and interpret this piece with an anti – war perspective. Vonnegut demonstrates his own antiwar sentiments throughout Slaughterhouse – Five with the use of irony, satire, science fiction and dark humor .
Billy Pilgrim, the main character, is similar to Vonnegut in many ways. One can agree that the most significant time in Vonnegut’s life was when he served in WWII, and was a prisoner of war (POW) in Dresden, Germany. There he experienced the firebombings of Dresden, which greatly shaped his feelings about war (1969 Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five). When Vonnegut created Billy Pilgrim, he made Billy subject to the experience of war. In fact, like Vonnegut , Billy was able to experience the same situations including the experiences of being a POW and in the firebombing of Dresden. But in Billy's case, Vonnegut writes with a sense of being anti – war (Insanity). For instance, when Vonnegut writes of the ways Billy views things, he makes Billy's view "slanted, which makes the reader perceive the war as something absurd, grotesque, macabre--in any case, not quite real" (Classic Notes). Here it is apparent that Vonnegut uses Billy to let the reader know of his own personal views by creating Billy much like himself. Vonnegut said the he always meant to place himself in all of his works and here is a great example of that (American Writers 753).
Though Vonnegut already emphasized Billy in his life during the war, he continues to do so after as well. Billy struggles to put himself back together after the war, which really shows the destructive power of war, but he does finally resolve to be an optometrist. One can also interpret his profession as a theme:
Perez 2 the importance of sight (Lichtenstein). This relates to Billy having “sight” bef...

... middle of paper ...

... Cited:

1969 Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. 01 Dec. 2004.

Dunstan, Brittany. "Destruction of Dresden, Destruction of Vonnegut's Dream." Mark Vit's Kurt
Vonnegut Corner. Ed.Mark Vit. May 1999. 28 Nov. 2004.

"Insanity of War in Slaughterhouse-Five." Classic Notes. 2000. Grade Saver. 28 Nov 2004. 260 - 269

"Kurt Vonnegut." American Writers. Vol. 2 Supplement II, Part 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1981. 750 – 755.

"Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Sharon R. Gunton and Jean C. Stine. Volume
22. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1982. 263 - 267

Lichtenstein, Jesse. "Slaughterhouse-Five: Themes, Motifs, and Symbols." Spark Notes. 2002. Spark
Notes LLC. 29 Nov. 2004.

Quinn, Lewis. "A Critical Analysis of Slaughterhouse-Five."Mark Vit's Kurt Vonnegut Corner. Ed.
Mark Vit. Jan. 1998. 22 Nov. 2004.

"Slaughterhouse-Five." Novels for Students. Ed. Diane Telgen and Kevin Hile. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale
Research, 1998. 264-270.

Vit, Marek. "The Themes of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five." Mark Vit's Kurt
Vonnegut Corner. Ed. Marek Vit. Sept. 1997. 21 Nov. 2004.

Show More
Related

  • Reality And Fictionism In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

    762 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Comparing 2BR02B And Harrison Bergeron

    461 Words  | 1 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

    1981 Words  | 4 Pages

    “Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.” Stated Abraham Lincoln. That quotes applies to Slaughterhouse-Five because even when you think you have conquered something and achieve the victory doesn’t mean that it will last long. Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim is non-heroic in the anti-war novel which makes the theme of the book Slaughterhouse-Five a man who is “unstuck” in time.

    Read More

  • Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five -- A Great American Novel

    1390 Words  | 3 Pages

    After serving in World War Two, Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five about his experiences through Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five is a dark novel about war and death. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental disease that inflicts people who endured a traumatic event. Some of the common symptoms include flashbacks and creating alternate worlds which Billy Pilgrim experienced various times throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim believes he has become “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 29) and travels to different moments throughout his life. Pilgrim is never in one event for long and his flashbacks are triggered by almost everything he does. While his “time-traveling” is sporadic and never to a relevant time, all of Billy Pilgrims flashbacks are connected through actions done in each of the visions. Perhaps the most important flashback occurred at ...

    Read More

  • Relationships and Interdependence in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut

    2146 Words  | 5 Pages

    New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1997. Vit, Marek. Kurt Vonnegut Corner: Kurt Vonnegut Essay Collection. http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_essays.html

    Read More

  • Free Slaughterhouse-Five Essays: Dresden

    563 Words  | 2 Pages

    "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.

    Read More

  • Unequality in Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

    860 Words  | 2 Pages

    Festa, Conrad. “Vonnegut’s Satire.” Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Vol. 5. 1977. 133-50. The GaleGroup. Web. 10 March. 2014.

    Read More

  • Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five as an Antiwar Novel

    2286 Words  | 5 Pages

    When Vonnegut created Billy Pilgrim, he made Billy subject to the experience of the war. In fact, Billy experiences it almost. exactly the same as Vonnegut himself had, including the experiences of being a POW and in the firebombing of Dresden. The. But in Billy's case, Vonnegut writes it with.

    Read More

  • Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron and Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

    1641 Words  | 4 Pages

    Vonnegut, Kurt. Harrison Bergeron. New York: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1961. Print

    Read More

  • Free Will In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

    1845 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, he talks about World War II and the bombing of Dresden. He writes about this historical event through the character Billy Pilgrim, Billy is drafted into the army at age twenty-one during World War II. He is captured and sent to Luxembourg and then later Dresden as a prisoner. Throughout the novel, Vonnegut constantly ridiculous Billy. He describes Billy as a character that has no individualism and no choice in anything that happens in his life.

    Read More

  • Insanity In The Things They Carried By O. Vonnegut

    1351 Words  | 3 Pages

    There is a fine line between sanity and insanity, a line that can be crossed or purposefully avoided. The books The Things They Carried and Slaughterhouse-Five both explore the space around this line as their characters confront war. While O’Brien and Vonnegut both use repetition to emphasize acceptance of fate, their characters’ psychological and internal responses to war differ significantly. In The Things They Carried, the narrator and Norman Bowker carry guilt as evidence of sanity. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim and the innkeepers carry on with life in order to perpetuate sanity. Both authors develop a distinct theme of responding in the face of the insanity of war.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse-Five'

    1430 Words  | 3 Pages

    “How nice – to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive” (Vonnegut 50). In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut introduces the genuine danger war implements on the innocent minds of soldiers by introducing Billy Pilgrim as a prisoner and Dresden bombing survivor. Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel appropriates around a science fiction theme where Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck” in time. This allows Billy to experience his life disorderly.

    Read More

  • A Comparison Of Slaughterhouse Five And The Things They Carried

    1093 Words  | 3 Pages

    In conclusion Slaughterhouse-Five and The Things They Carried are two successful anti-war novels. Slaughterhouse-Five is over the top with its science fiction and illusion, while The Things They Carried is serious and reflective. These books are different in tone and the two authors take similar routes to the same goal. Both books are based on the experiences of the authors themselves. The two books run parallel and tell the terrors of war. These books are both paintings of human nature in the perspective of war and by showing the behavior of humans at war. These books effectively send their anti-war messages to readers.

    Read More

  • S Cradle And Slaughterhouse-Five, By Kurt Vonnegut

    763 Words  | 2 Pages

    Without a doubt, war is an experience that can define a person, for good or bad. In the case of author Kurt Vonnegut, his experiences in World War II greatly affected his writing. Most of his works in his long bibliography of novels, articles, short stories, and plays have some sort of reference or allusion to war or other world conflicts. Kurt Vonnegut uses his novels Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five to preach against war by stringing together loose and outlandish story lines in a satirical and melancholy fashion.

    Read More

  • Why Slaughterhouse-Five Is an Anti-War Novel

    659 Words  | 2 Pages

    In conclusion, Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war novel because Vonnegut, the character, says it is in the first chapter, the terrible damage it left on Billy, and how it exposes war's horrifying practices. Knowing these elements, one might wonder why people still have wars. Although these anti-war novels cannot completely stop wars, they are important. The role that such novels play is one of raising awareness of war's actions and wrongdoings. Since the role of the novels is important, authors should continue to write them to keep people informed and educated about a problem of such a huge magnitude.

    Read More

More about Style Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut on Slaughterhouse Five

Open Document