Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
kurt vonnegut critical essay
the effect of war on kurt vonnegut
the effect of war on kurt vonnegut
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: kurt vonnegut critical essay
Kurt Vonnegut as Social Critic
Those who write on the human condition are often philosophers who write with convoluted language that few can understand. Kurt Vonnegut, however, focuses on the same questions, and provides his own personal answers with as much depth as that of the must educated philosopher. He avoids stilted language typical of philosophers, using shorter sentences, less complex vocabulary, humorous tangents, and outrageous stories to get his point across. With this style, Vonnegut presents the age-old question "How do we as humans live in this world?" in a manner appealing and understandable to the less educated mass. When offering advice to writers on how to write, Vonnegut said, "Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers ever willing to simplify and clarify, whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales" (Palm Sunday p. 71). Vonnegut does not try to enthrall the read with eloquent language. Instead, he gets his point across, asking the reader to consider his ideas, and that is what truly matters because writing is simply a means of expressing ideas. By writing books that are easily read, Kurt Vonnegut makes constructive criticism of human society available to everybody.
One of Vonnegut's main themes focuses on perhaps the greatest atrocity man commits- war. As a World War II survivor and witness of the Dresden firebombing, Vonnegut uses his novels to question this destructive process. It makes little sense that we should kill each other and destroy the earth because of hate, territory, or any of the other causes of war. Vonnegut directs our attention to the millions of people who so inhumanely lose their lives to war. Does it make sen...
... middle of paper ...
...1972.
Schatt, Stanley. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1976.
Vonnegut, Jr. Kurt. Palm Sunday. Dell Publishing Company. 1999.
"Bands Influenced by Vonnegut". 24 May 2001. <http://www.ipass.net/~brianrodr/vonnegut/bands.html>
Farber, Donald."The Complete Kurt Vonnegut Webpage". 24 May 2001. <http://web.mit.edu/sbl/www/vonnegut/>
Huber, Chris. "The Vonnegut Web" 24 May 2001. <http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/kv/>
"Kurt Vonnegut Quotes". 24 May 2001. <http://mike.wiggins.org/kvquotes.htm>
"The Kurt Vonnegut Booklist". 24 May 2001 <http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~ee0r/vonnegut.html>
"Quotes on Religion- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.". 25 May 2001. <http://atheism.about.com/religion/atheism/library/quotes/bl_q_KVonnegut.htm>
War is seen as a universal concept that often causes discomfort and conflict in relation to civilians. As they are a worrying universal event that has occurred for many decades now, they posed questions to society about human's nature and civilization. Questions such as is humanity sane or insane? and do humans have an obsession with destruction vs creation. These questions are posed from the two anti-war texts; Dr Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick and Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut.
Relationships and Interdependence in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut While on the surface Kurt Vonnegut's works appear to singularly contain the pessimistic views of an aging, black humorist, his underlying meanings reveal a much more sympathetic and hopeful glimpse of humanity that lends itself to eventual societal improvement. As part of Vonnegut's strategy for enhanced communal welfare, the satirist details in the course of his works potential artificial family groups to connect the masses and alleviate the lonely.
Critics often suggest that Kurt Vonnegut’s novels represent a man’s desperate, yet, futile search for meaning in a senseless existence. Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, displays this theme. Kurt Vonnegut uses a narrator, which is different from the main character. He uses this technique for several reasons.
middle of paper ... ... It is clear that although Vonnegut's picture of the modern man is often bleak, he never totally abandons the glimmer of hope that accompanies the fact that life has its moments of grandeur. He encourages the modern reader to escape the question "why me" and urges us to embrace a philosophy that consistently reminds us that even in the midst of the most cruel (and the most celebrated) events, humanity retains all of its virtue and vice.
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five as an Antiwar Novel. War can affect and inspire people to many degrees. Kurt Vonnegut was inspired by war to write Slaughterhouse Five. which is a unique book referred to sometimes as a science fiction or semi-autobiographical novel.
How should we react to the horrors of war, heartache, and famine? Do we try to solve our problems all at once, or do we sit back and watch things fall apart? Kurt Vonnegut has an interesting idea of what to do, as is shown in his novel, Slaughter House Five. Vonnegut's prescription for dealing with the tragic absurdity of the twentieth century is to simply not deal with it. In his novel, Vonnegut shows that he is more inclined to sit back and watch than to let things affect him.
One of the best, most valuable aspects of reading multiple works by the same author is getting to know the author as a person. People don't identify with Gregor Samsa; they identify with Kafka. Witness the love exhibited by the many fans of Hemingway, a love for both the texts and the drama of the man. It's like that for me with Kurt Vonnegut, but it strikes me that he pulls it off in an entirely different way.
Slaughterhouse Five is not a book that should be glanced over and discarded away like a dirty rag. Slaughterhouse Five is a book that should be carefully analyzed and be seen as an inspiration to further improve the well-being of mankind. Vonnegut makes it clear that an easy way to improve mankind is to see war not as a place where legends are born, but rather, an event to be avoided. Intelligent readers and critics alike should recognize Vonnegut’s work and see to it that they make an effort to understand the complexities behind the human condition that lead us to war.
American were treated equal lies right by Fall Creek. Vonnegut was nothing if not a Hoosier.
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
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.
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 man to sign up for the army and go off to war to fight for the
Oscar Wilde, an acclaimed Irish Poet, novelist, dramatist and critic once aptly commented, “Men become old, but they never become good”. The philosophical aspect of this quote relies on the basis that human beings are inherently malevolent. Through his pessimistic perspective, Wilde clearly captures the ill-disposed mindset of mankind. Moreover, there are various deductive arguments that discredit the optimistic depiction of human nature. One of the prime examples can be found in Kurt Vonnegut’s literature. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat's Cradle, through the illustration of his characters, the author symbolizes the four elements of human fallibility.
"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.