Kurt Vonnegut's Laughterhouse-Five

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“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”-Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut is an American novelist and writer most well-known during the 1970s due to his breakthrough anti-war book, Slaughterhouse-Five.Vonnegut was born in 1922 and died in 2007, but is survived by three children. This paper covers the life of Mr. Vonnegut in its entirety from his childhood to his death, and talks about his most famous piece of literature, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on November 11, 1922 as the youngest of three children. His father ,Kurt Vonnegut Sr., was a successful architect and his mother, Edith, was the daughter …show more content…

Weary blamed Billy for his death, although it was a result of Weary’s own incompetence.
The main theme in Slaughterhouse Five is free will versus fate. The Tralfamadorians instill in Billy that free will is a myth, and is only talked about on Earth. “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” Says the Tralfamadorians. They convey the message that nothing can change anything that will ever happen, with all moments happening at once. One Tralfamadorian describes it to Billy as that we are “bugs in amber,” and just trapped in one moment in time. The Tralfamadorians provide an apparatus for Vonnegut to elaborate on free will versus fate.
One aspect that makes Slaughterhouse Five truly unique is the way it’s structured. It is not in a chronological or linear order, jumping to different times about every few paragraphs. Billy might be in Dresden, and be on Tralfamadore three paragraphs later. This makes the book much more intriguing and leaves the reader with no information on what is coming next.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Slaughterhouse Five is its symbolism of the isolation some veterans feel after war. Billy being “unstuck in time” is symbolic and a metaphor to the detachment some survivors of war feel to society after experiencing war and inhumanity at its

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