The Theme Of War In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

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How has Slaughterhouse Five borrowed from other texts to emphasize the theme of war? The novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a narrative about a man named Billy Pilgrim. Billy participates in World War II and the novel follows his life and focuses on his reaction to the war and his travels to an extraterrestrial planet called Tralfamadore. Many speculate that this book reflects Vonnegut’s feelings about war and have drawn parallels between Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim. Kurt Vonnegut has the characters read various texts throughout Slaughterhouse Five to emphasize his feelings about war. Midway through the book, Billy awakes to his friend Edgar Derby reading The Red Badge of Courage (Vonnegut 105). This is a book about a young teenager …show more content…

The first of these texts is Words for the Wind, a collection of poems by Theodore Roethke. He quotes the first stanza of the poem “The Waking.” This poem discusses human life and the best way to live it. The first line, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow,” uses sleep and wake as metaphors for death and life. The second line “I feel my fate in what I cannot fear” which is the speaker telling the reader that in life you must accept what will happen and you cannot be afraid of it. The third and final line quoted in Slaughterhouse Five reads “I learn by going where I have to go” (Vonnegut 20). This line is repeated throughout the poem and means that a human will gain the most experience in life not by doing what he or she wants to do, but what he or she must do. Vonnegut understands that war is necessary when under the right circumstances and that sometimes soldiers must go to war. However, he is opposed to war when “it looks just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them” (Vonnegut 14). By having the narrator read this poem by Theodore Roethke, Vonnegut can express his perspective and understanding of

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