Traumatic Experiences In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Vonnegut uses his own trauma and the opinion he has on killing, which was shaped by the war, to spread to his readers or listeners a message of pacifism and a plan of action in order to mankind from its destructive ways. “Throughout this first chapter there is a kind of pleading insistence, a desire to impress upon the reader the fact that the author has experienced the horrors and sincerely felt the grief” (O’Sullivan 125). Again, despite this discussing a chapter in his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, it applies to the speech being discussed. Although the mentioning of the traumatic experiences in his speech are subtle and a listener must think deeply, it is still obvious that one must know of Vonnegut’s traumatic life in order to understand

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

Clearly Vonnegut is disgusted by all of the killing when he uses terms like “blow the hell out of.” The Hershey bar reference could be a direct insight to his war experience, because Hershey bars were often part of a soldier’s rations and Vonnegut could have known from experience that that is what countries used to fix others and that a Hershey bar does nothing in the grand scheme of things. Vonnegut believes that mankind thinks that they can create all this destruction and then make it all better by giving temporary fixes but due to his own experience with mass death, realizes that truly is not the correct way. “Memory residues surface through free association in psychoanalytic treatment, they appear in public life through the creation of literature” (Alexander 11).” Kurt Vonnegut’s own traumatic experiences can be seen through his literature, especially his speech given at Hobart and William Smith. Though the psychoanalytic theory or treatment argues that these memories surfacing is unconscious, it is clear that Vonnegut consciously includes memories such as the Hershey’s bars to help get his point across. By utilizing his own personal experiences, he is able to help formulate a path for