Traumatically stressed from the reverence from the bombing of dresden. Vonnegut attempts to manifest his fractured state into writing, yet he is unable to portray these ideals intelligently as he states that “nothing intelligent could be said about a massacre(Vonnegut 23)”. Conventional methods of storytelling prohibit him from, in an attempt to portray the atrocities of war, expressing his ideals in a meaningful manner. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Slaughterhouse uses Billy Pilgrim and postmodernist literary techniques such as metafiction, temporal distortion and fragmentation as a modes for chaos. Therefore, as a character, Billy Pilgrim symbolizes the chaos that exist not only within the novel, but also within war. Vonnegut
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By writing about the process and the principles on writing a novel about war, he can effectively criticize on the frailty of commentating about the nature of war. With this in mind, the first chapter talks about the process of writing the book, with a specific line “It’s so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. … And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”(Vonnegut 19).” Vonnegut says that his book is “short, jumbled and jangled”. He is referring to the temporal and ontological elements of his novel. Since the novel travels around in a nonlinear fashion, harbors a fragmented state of mind, and is ontologically meaningless. He concludes his statement with his reasoning, as he says that “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” This statement encapsulates the whole purpose of his writing, including the meaning of the fragmented structure, temporal distortion and ontological uncertainty. The creation of Billy Pilgrim helps him effectively illustrate this position, as Billy is as much as a traveler with no meaningful effect of the events he partakes in, than a modernist or realist character with discernable …show more content…
From Billy being “ born in 1922 in Ilium...graduated from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class (Vonnegut 23)” to his “service with the infantry in Europe… taken prisoner by the Germans (Vonnegut 24).” to his treatment “ in a veteran’s hospital near Lake Placid (Vonnegut 24).” and finally “Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered an airplane… The plane crashed on top of Sugarbush Mountain (Vonnegut 24).” With this distorted sense of time, from jumping to enlistment in the military to crashing a plane full of optometrists, makes the structure and events of the book seem fragmented. No particular event is given any explanation, closure and seemingly have no relevance to one another, making the events somewhat meaningless in the grand narrative. Thus, by distorting the concept of linearity, a notion of order and tact, Vonnegut tries to illustrate the feelings of post-war society, feeling disillusioned and searching for a semblance of meaning, and attempts to reflect these feelings within the book as Billy jumps through time, bring disorder within the novel. To help indicate that the same feelings that Billy feels, are similar, if not, the same as the soldiers of WWII experienced. Vonnegut makes a statement by distorting the linearity of time, that war and the awareness of time become incongruent
By writing about the process and the principles on writing a novel about war, he can effectively criticize on the frailty of commentating about the nature of war. With this in mind, the first chapter talks about the process of writing the book, with a specific line “It’s so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. … And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”(Vonnegut 19).” Vonnegut says that his book is “short, jumbled and jangled”. He is referring to the temporal and ontological elements of his novel. Since the novel travels around in a nonlinear fashion, harbors a fragmented state of mind, and is ontologically meaningless. He concludes his statement with his reasoning, as he says that “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” This statement encapsulates the whole purpose of his writing, including the meaning of the fragmented structure, temporal distortion and ontological uncertainty. The creation of Billy Pilgrim helps him effectively illustrate this position, as Billy is as much as a traveler with no meaningful effect of the events he partakes in, than a modernist or realist character with discernable …show more content…
From Billy being “ born in 1922 in Ilium...graduated from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class (Vonnegut 23)” to his “service with the infantry in Europe… taken prisoner by the Germans (Vonnegut 24).” to his treatment “ in a veteran’s hospital near Lake Placid (Vonnegut 24).” and finally “Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered an airplane… The plane crashed on top of Sugarbush Mountain (Vonnegut 24).” With this distorted sense of time, from jumping to enlistment in the military to crashing a plane full of optometrists, makes the structure and events of the book seem fragmented. No particular event is given any explanation, closure and seemingly have no relevance to one another, making the events somewhat meaningless in the grand narrative. Thus, by distorting the concept of linearity, a notion of order and tact, Vonnegut tries to illustrate the feelings of post-war society, feeling disillusioned and searching for a semblance of meaning, and attempts to reflect these feelings within the book as Billy jumps through time, bring disorder within the novel. To help indicate that the same feelings that Billy feels, are similar, if not, the same as the soldiers of WWII experienced. Vonnegut makes a statement by distorting the linearity of time, that war and the awareness of time become incongruent