Kurt Vonnegut is considered by many to be the greatest American author of the twentieth century. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on November 11, 1922 to Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and Edith Vonnegut. His father was a prominent architect in Indianapolis, and provided well for his three children until the Great Depression hit in 1929. The Depression put Kurt, Sr. out of work, and harmed his spirits in such a way that he essentially gave up on life. His wife, Edith, ultimately resorted to alcoholism and prescription drug abuse as an escape from the troubling times the Depression brought upon the Vonnegut household. These habits eventually resulted in her death in 1944. At age 20, Kurt, Jr. was deployed in Germany to serve during the Second World War. He witnessed firsthand the firebombing of the German city, Dresden, which accounted for the deaths of around 60,000 persons. His experiences in Dresden, as well as his troubling home life, have resulted in his signature satirical, black comic voice, which permits Vonnegut to make his readers laugh no matter how grim the subject matter being described. Vonnegut’s 1969 masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest antiwar novels ever produced. The novel follows the life of Billy Pilgrim, a time-traveling World War II chaplain’s assistant, through his wartime experiences as well as his expeditions to Tralfamadore, the planet where he is taken and put on display by aliens who strongly resemble plungers. The Tralfamadorians teach Billy the concept that time is unalterable, and that any event that happens has happened and will forever happen. There is no free will on Tralfamadore. Destiny is unalterable:
I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might ...
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McGinnis, Wayne D. "The Arbitrary Cycle of 'Slaughterhouse-Five': A Relation of Form to Theme." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 17.1 (1975): 55-67. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 60. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
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Slaughter House Five - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
After a dramatic event happens in someone’s life such as war, some people cannot function the same way as they did previously. To make a reference to the novel, "Slaughterhouse five" written by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim’s character experiences war during World War II. Some drastic changes happened in his way of dealing with the fact of surviving a war. He claims to travel in time and to meet Aliens, called the "Tralfamadorian’s". This essay will discuss Billy believing that he is meeting Aliens and traveling in time, but in fact he only has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after surviving the war.
Smith, Helmut Walser. The Butcher’s Tale. New York & London: Norton W.W. Norton & Company. 2002.
The tone of the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a mixture of candid and matter of fact, with an underlying tone of indifference and detachment. This tone is displayed throughout the chapter with Vonnegut’s use of informal language and phrases, such as the first sentence “All this happened, more or less.” He conveys this tone not only through phrases such as “and so on” or “so it goes”, but with stylistic elements with his use of punctuation, spaces, repetition, and ellipses. He uses this tone in the first chapter to set the audience up for how the rest of the novel will be written, and to display to the audience his style of writing and how it may not always be reliable.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five the main character Billy Pilgrim experiences few emotions during his time in World War II. His responses to people and events lack intensity or passion. Throughout the novel Billy describes his time travel to different moments in his life, including his experience with the creatures of Tralfamadore and the bombing of Dresden. He wishes to die during most of the novel and is unable to connect with almost anyone on Earth. The fictional planet Tralfamadore appears to be Billy’s only way of escaping the horrors of war, and acts as coping mechanism. Billy seems to be a soldier with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as he struggles to express feelings and live in his reality. At the beginning of the novel the narrator proposes his reason for writing the book is to explain what happened in the Dresden fire bombing, yet he focuses on Billy’s psyche more than the bombing itself. PTSD prevents Billy from living a healthy life, which shows readers that the war does not stop after the fighting is over and the aftermath is ongoing. Billy Pilgrim’s story portrays the bombing and war in a negative light to readers, as Vonnegut shows the damaging effects of war on an individual, such as misperception of time, disconnect from peers, and inability to feel strong emotions, to overall create a stronger message.
One can only imagine the intense emotional scarring that one would suffer after exiting an underground shelter with a dozen other men to find a city destroyed and its people dead, corpses laying all around. These feelings are what prompted Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse-Five as he did. The main character of this novel mirrors the author in many ways, but the striking similarity is their inability to deal with the events of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945. Section Two- Critical Commentaries Kurt Vonnegut's work is nothing new to critics, but Slaughterhouse-Five is considered to be his best work.
Meeter, Glenn. "Vonnegut's Formal and Moral Otherworldliness: Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five," in Jerome Klinkowitz & John Somer (eds.), The Vonnegut Statement. USA: Delacourte Press/ Seymour Lawrence, 1973, 204-220.
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.
He also visits a slaughterhouse and gets a tour of the place. When walking through the place, he was warned that they would step on blood so he should tuck his pants into his boots. When he is walking in, he sees employees, mostly women, slicing meat with sharp knives. They slice one and then grab another right after. A few workers even carve the meat with a instrument called Whizzards. The Whizzed looks like a Norelco razor. Some employees were even sweating although it was freezing cold inside. There is a floor called the kill floor, on the kill floor there areas many cows that are stripped out of their skin and they are dangling from strings that are attached to the ceiling. The author now gets feels like he is in a slaughterhouse. He sees people pulling out the kidneys with their bare hands. The sight was very disturbing. The slaughterhouses are located in a rural area which make one of the theme rural land use. Another theme is folk culture because it means traditions that are made by rural groups and the slaughterhouse is how meat gets packed instead of any other
After I read the “Slaughterhouse-Five” (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969), I found it interesting that the author wrote this satirical novel about World War II experiences using time travel. Even though the time travel makes the story look chaotic and confused, I believe the author had deep meaning about the time travel. Also, the author uses a lot of black humor to critical the war.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of Billy Pilgrim 's capture by the Nazi Germans during the last years of World War II. Throughout the narrative, excerpts of Billy’s life are portrayed from his pre-war self to his post-war insanity. Billy is able to move both forward and backwards through his life in a random cycle of events. Living the dull life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a provocative woman on the planet Tralfamadore, and simultaneously an American prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. While I agree with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt that Slaughterhouse-Five effectively combines fact and fiction, I argue that the book is more centralized around coping.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Perennial, 2002.
This independent reading assignment is dedicated to Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut experienced many hardships during and as a result of his time in the military, including World War II, which he portrays through the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim. Slaughterhouse-Five, however, not only introduces these military experiences and the internal conflicts that follow, but also alters the chronological sequence in which they occur. Billy is an optometry student that gets drafted into the military and sent to Luxembourg to fight in the Battle of Bulge against Germany. Though he remains unscathed, he is now mentally unstable and becomes “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 30). This means that he is able to perceive
Throughout his career, Kurt Vonnegut has used writing as a tool to convey penetrating messages and ominous warnings about our society. He skillfully combines vivid imagery with a distinctly satirical and anecdotal style to explore complex issues such as religion and war. Two of his most well known, and most gripping, novels that embody this subtle talent are Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. Both books represent Vonnegut’s genius for manipulating fiction to reveal glaring, disturbing and occasionally redemptive truths about human nature. On the surface, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five are dramatically different novels, each with its own characters, symbols, and plot. However, a close examination reveals that both contain common themes and ideas. Examining and comparing the two novels and their presentation of different themes provides a unique insight into both the novels and the author – allowing the reader to gain a fuller understanding of Vonnegut’s true meaning.
“Slaughterhouse-Five” is an anti-war novel. It describes a flesh-and-blood world. Main character is Billy Pilgrim, he is a time traveler in this book, his first name Billy is from the greatest novelist in the USA in 19 century’s novel “Billy Budd” ; and his last name is from “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan. Differently, the main character in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” ’s traveling has meaning and discovering, Billy Pilgrim’s traveling just has violence and escape. In the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut ’s main character, Billy Pilgrim is sane and his time travel is half in his mind half is real. He is looked so innocent and weakness, there is a sentence which is spoken by Billy Pilgrim “So it goes.” (2) This quotation shows that a poignant sense of helplessness.