Theme Of Slaughterhouse Five

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In our book club we discussed “Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children 's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death” a short anti-war novel in which Kurt Vonnegut, the author, presents an important aspect of war through his tragic war experience in Dresden, which killed thousands of Germans mostly civilians, and destroyed one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. Vonnegut’s main character, Billy Pilgrim, is used to explore the various themes about life and war. He has became a prisoner of war to show the senseless destruction, pointlessness, and hate of war.
The beginning of this book was somewhat confusing, we all wondered if the book was really the authors trouble of putting the book together that led to its structure or if it was meant to represent something else. We had …show more content…

Vonnegut’s antiwar feelings create a major theme that emerges in Slaughterhouse Five. While talking to Mary O’Hare in the opening chapter of the novel, he reveals the main intent of this book. Mary refutes with Vonnegut saying, “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies” (14). This shows that she doesn’t like war and how it causes innocent deaths. While bringing up this …show more content…

Without such extensive imagery and the help of the group, Slaughterhouse Five would have been a clump of events with no type of understanding and Billy’s life would have been incomprehensible. Having this book club was able to make the reading a lot easier to understand. And since we had a better understanding it became quite an interesting book. If I wasn’t a part of this group, I don’t think I would have enjoyed the book because I wouldn’t have been able to find as much meaning in

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