Billy Pilgrim In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

“Slaughterhouse 5” by Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most complex and intriguing novels I have ever read, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I also appreciated the fact that we analyzed this book in class, although this is a book that I feel would be hard to understand unless analyzed from the point of view of the author. This is also a very difficult book to summarize, considering the fact that it is not written in any type of chronological order. That being said, the lack of an order of events that occurred in the book adds depth and connections that could not be made if the book had been written in order. It also allows us to see more clearly the author’s thought process in writing this book, which helps us to analyze and understand it a little more. …show more content…
At the beginning of reading this book, I believed that Billy Pilgrim was a pseudonym for Kurt Vonnegut, and that this story was told so well because he wrote about his own experiences in life and as a prisoner of war. I learned later on that this was not the case; that Billy Pilgrim had been based off of a man that Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war with in World War II. This book was a commentary by Kurt Vonnegut on the effects of war and, specifically, the Dresden bombing. Billy Pilgrim survives this bombing, and he describes the destruction of the city he sees with the phrase “poo-tee-weet.” There are no words that could help one to comprehend the devastation that is caused by