War is the epitome of cruelty and violence, an experience that can prove maddening and strip away some of the most intrinsic characteristics of humanity. Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II inspired his critically hailed novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), in which characters continually search for meaning in the aftermath of mankind’s irrational cruelty ("Kurt Vonnegut: 1922-2007" 287). Both the main character, Billy Pilgrim, and Vonnegut have been in Dresden for the firebombing, and that is what motivates their narrative (Klinkowitz 335). In his anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut expresses the adverse emotional effects of war through the psyche of Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut’s distinct style conveys that the horrors of war are not only tragic, but inexplicable and absurd. His use of black humor, such as Billy's attempts to publicize his encounters with the Tralfamadorians, conveys the incongruity/senselessness of war (“Slaughterhouse-Five” 267). While this is an example of black humor in a larger plot element, the device can also be used in small details. This is evident in the description of the half-crazed Billy Pilgrim after the Battle of the Bulge. “Wind and cold and violent exercise had turned his face crimson” causing Billy to be designated by Vonnegut as a “filthy flamingo” (Vonnegut 42). By utilizing black humor, Vonnegut is able to convey not merely the tragedy, but also the absurdity, of an event. Vonnegut’s uniqueness of style includes not only the descriptions of events but their arrangement as well. The narrator tells his friend that “It is so short and jumbled and jangled Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre” (Vonnegut 24). Starting du... ... middle of paper ... ...d. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 254. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008. 287-89. Literature Criticism Online. Web. 9 Apr. 2014. Niose, David A. “Kurt Vonnegut Saw Humanism as a Way to Build a Better World.” Humanism 67.4 (2007): 22. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 254. Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, 2008. 372. Literature Criticism Online. Web. 20 Apr. 2014. “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Novels for Students. Ed. Diane Telgen and Kevin Hile. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 258-77. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 14 Apr. 2014. Vanderwerken, David L. “Pilgrim’s Dilemma: Slaughterhouse-Five.” Research Studies 42.3 (1974): 147-52. Rpt. in Novels for Students. Ed. Diane Telgen and Kevin Hile. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 274-77. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 1 May 2014. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dial, 1969. Print.
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.
Most literary scholars accredit Kurt Vonnegut’s literary voice as a style of dark comedy or humor to tell the stories in his writing that are typically horrific and macabre. According to Smith (2014), “In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut embellishes the scope of black humor by incorporating irony and by using vocabulary that creates a mock-serious tone, often leading to absurdity”. Arguably Vonnegut’s most famous novel and where most scholars agree Vonnegut’s literary voice is most prominent is in Slaughterhouse-five. An example of Vonnegut’s dark humor is a scene in which American prisoners
For a novel to be considered a Great American Novel, it must contain a theme that is uniquely American, a hero that is the essence of a great American, or relevance to the American people. Others argue, however, that the Great American Novel may never exist. They say that America and her image are constantly changing and therefore, there will never be a novel that can represent the country in its entirety. In his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut writes about war and its destructiveness. Vonnegut tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an unlikely hero, mentally scarred by World War Two. Kurt Vonnegut explains how war is so devastating it can ruin a person forever. These are topics that are reoccurring in American history and have a relevance to the American people thus making Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five a Great American Novel.
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
"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.
One can only imagine the intense emotional scarring that one would suffer after exiting an underground shelter with a dozen other men to find a city destroyed and its people dead, corpses laying all around. These feelings are what prompted Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse-Five as he did. The main character of this novel mirrors the author in many ways, but the striking similarity is their inability to deal with the events of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945. Section Two- Critical Commentaries Kurt Vonnegut's work is nothing new to critics, but Slaughterhouse-Five is considered to be his best work.
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.
Throughout his career, Kurt Vonnegut has used writing as a tool to convey penetrating messages and ominous warnings about our society. He skillfully combines vivid imagery with a distinctly satirical and anecdotal style to explore complex issues such as religion and war. Two of his most well known, and most gripping, novels that embody this subtle talent are Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. Both books represent Vonnegut’s genius for manipulating fiction to reveal glaring, disturbing and occasionally redemptive truths about human nature. On the surface, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five are dramatically different novels, each with its own characters, symbols, and plot. However, a close examination reveals that both contain common themes and ideas. Examining and comparing the two novels and their presentation of different themes provides a unique insight into both the novels and the author – allowing the reader to gain a fuller understanding of Vonnegut’s true meaning.
Billy Pilgrim is also not like Pilgrim who is the main character in the “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, although they have same last name. His experience is very horrible in the war, there are just have violence and cruel, like the soldier who is in the “Three musketeers”. Imaginary, a man who just naive and have a great lucky, how can he keep his life in the war, just lucky? It is funny. Thus, though the whole novel “Slaughter-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character, Billy Pilgrim is a contradictory person who has the naive and sane attitude together, in almost time he looks like a child, but his wise can “see” at his speaking and action, likes his speaking “So it goes.” (2) Not only is the indifference to the lives, or the hatred and
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.
The narrative structure in Slaughterhouse-Five is nonlinear. One of the greatest distinctive and unique aspects of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is the structure to which it is written. All through the novel, Billy Pilgrim journeys irrepressibly to non-chronological moments of his life, or as Vonnegut verbalizes, “paying random visits to all events in between.” (23). The structure of the novel is eccentric and does not actually have a well-defined beginning, middle, and end in the progression of the narrative. There is continuous movement amongst the future, past, and present in erratic ways. Vonnegut’s narrative consist of rapid brief paragraphs which do not follow a straight timeline, but as an alternative jolts forward and backward
Slaughterhouse Five is subtitled “The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death”, a stylistic choice by Vonnegut that highlights the omnipresence of young men enlisted in World War II, who satirically likens the war with a holy “Crusade”. Historically, the real Children’s Crusade involved young boys lured by Christian monks into believing “they were going to [fight in] Palestine”, but in reality, “half of the [children] were sold to North Africa”. Vonnegut compares this mass martyrdom of the 13th century with the indiscriminate bloodshed of the 1940s, juxtaposing “foolish virgins…right at the end of childhood” with the carnage and devastation of the Dresden firebombing. These “boys” were mislead by romanticised depictions of war and powerful figures in society, who utilised their absolute power to expose young boys to the savagery of man. Similarly, the establishment of Billy Pilgrim as an anti-hero serves to deprive war of its heroic status, and unveil the reality of wars incited by autarchic governments. Billy, a “tall and weak…funny-looking child” is characterised in the war as being “powerless to harm the enemy or help his friends”, a soldier who “bore no arms…had no helmet, no weapon and no boots”. He constantly “wanted to quit…he was hungry, embarrassed, incompetent”, and
“There are no characters in this story and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters” (Vonnegut 208-209). Slaughterhouse-Five is riddled with anti-war messages, and this quote explains a major one: a loss of meaning brought on by war. Vonnegut uses main character Billy Pilgrim to present and reflect on not the strategy, historical context, or glory of war but the pointlessness of war. Vonnegut experienced the horrors of World War II, specifically the bombing of Dresden, and effectively employs Billy to
These feelings clearly affected Vonnegut so deeply that he taught this lesson to his own children. By referring to the killing as a massacre, it can be seen how serious Vonnegut is about the matter, because he has seen it on a first-hand basis, he knows that the killing occurring the world (especially at the time of World War Two) is a massacre. Vonnegut’s distrust of the government can be seen in this quote. By telling his children, and therefore mankind, to not find satisfaction from killing he is altering them away from thinking as the government does and helping to fix the problem. By teaching this to his children is representative of him teaching it to mankind through his writing. Vonnegut’s pacifistic tendencies can be seen through his writing whether it be novel or speech. Priest analyzes that Vonnegut’s stance would be this, “How can the individual maintain dignity and exercise free will in a world overrun by death and destruction, a world in which both science and religion are powerless to provide solutions?” (Priest
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.