Rhetorical Devices In Slaughterhouse Five Essay

“War” the amount of power behind this non important word is immense.This world does not know how brutal war can be; it can completely shatter a person's mental status. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut does not only write about the history through his life and the Dresden bombing, but more about the impact it made on Billy, a former soldier who fought in the war. Vonnegut sorts out the rhetorical devices proper such as repetition, hyperboles, metaphors and other rhetorical devices to help give a better understanding of what Billy goes through after fighting in The Battle of Bulge. For instance, Vonnegut exploits the unintelligible phrase “and so it goes” through the story to demonstrate how time was immaterial during the war and how death after death nothing seemed to change. This phrase is said in the novel often that it becomes a repetition, after something disastrous or after something negligible . As said by Buckley, “it does not denote empathy”, it is …show more content…
He described them as “two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber’s”, to emphasize how confident and precise Billy felt about these creatures (26). In between these lines, he also placed polysyndeton to captivate the readers and interest them by repeating “and” which intensified the imagery significantly. The placement of this device gives a deeper insider of the actual way Billy imagined and viewed his hallucinations; they were incredibly real to him, which meant that there was perhaps no going back from the damage war had caused him. The saddest part is as fictional as Billys stories and accusations might sound throughout the story a great mount soldiers that come back are affected in tremendous ways and can experience the same thing, and even worse the innocent people that sadly also take part such as, kids, women and elderly as well