Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five comments largely on the destructive nature of war. Our childlike protagonist Billy Pilgrim was essentially robbed of his innocence due to his drafting into the military. My first thoughts on this novel were about how Billy’s story extends to other soldiers and victims of war. The breaking of men and women’s’ ability to cope with the world extends far past the case of Billy. This is not just an isolated incident, it occurs much more often than most people care to realize. This book also draws particular attention to the use of “children” in war and how inhumane it is. Slaughterhouse-Five analyzes under close scrutiny, the appalling nature of societies and their governments who allow such atrocities to continue.…

"He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next" (Vonnegut 23). Slaughterhouse-Five is written by Kurt Vonnegut who uses this story as an autobiography to explain what he experienced during the war. The reader follows a man named Billy Pilgrim go through his life in a sporadic jumps of memories. Billy served as a soldier in World War 2 and was present as a POW in the firebombing of Dresden. Following this event,…

Throughout a life full of flashbacks and conflicts, a person would imagine being confused in several different ways. In the novel Slaughterhouse- Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim has been through a life that no other human can imagine. With several themes built into this novel, Billy shows his growth within himself as a character. As Billy flashes back and forth from being in the army in Dresden, being captured on the planet of Tralfamadore, and his relationship with his fiancé, Billy gives…

In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut it is contrasted into two major perspectives, Biographical and Structuralist which reveal the devastations of war. Kurt Vonnegut is undoubtedly displaying his life experiences through Billy Pilgrim and his encounters,as he enlisted in the army and exhibits the horrors of war. Kurt channels his experiences through a third person perspective which Billy is essentially a physical manifestation of his memories “The war parts, anyway, are pretty much…

Ivanna Guerrero English 2 September 9, 2015 Fate and Free Will in “Slaughterhouse-Five” The novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, is about a war veteran named Billy Pilgrim who goes through war and at the same time goes back and forward in time to a moment in his life. He went from times he was in war, back to when he was an eye doctor, back to war again, then forward to when he was at home writing to the newspaper, back to war again, and so on. He went through hard times in life and…

famously known as the author of Slaughterhouse- Five. In the book of Slaughterhouse-Five written by Vonnegut, takes place in the era World War II and introduces a man named Billy Pilgrim, as he was taken as a prisoner of war where he was surrounded by death. The book does an incredible job expressing its theme as destructive, challenging, and warlike. Billy Pilgrim was born in Illium, New York on 1922. He went to school of optometry and was then was sent to europe to provide service to the…

My favorite aspect of this book was the way all of the themes worked symbiotically to create a very dynamic story. This book forced me to pay attention to the plot, something I can say about very few books. The complexity of Slaughterhouse-Five resided in the inability or unwillingness of Vonnegut to settle on a single theme or mode of discourse It took me until the end of the first chapter to discover what was going on; I even thought I had picked up the author’s edition by mistake.…

Slaughterhouse Five explains a story that was completely over its’ time; Kurt Vonnegut, the author, shares a life story about a character name Billy who is struggling his way back to “normal”. Billy experienced a traumatic beat in his life at war. War has been happening for centuries. What was ahead of his time? The syndrome Billy was having to deal with, is currently discovered and is named, PTSD; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it was open to the public in the 20th century. Throughout the…

Slaughterhouse-Five’s phrase repetition analysis Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi autobiography of the journey of Billy Pilgrim through WWII merged together with time travel and aliens. He sees his own birth and death and everything in between. According to Vonnegut, this book is “short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligence to say about a massacre” (19). The author uses the repetition of phrases and events, such as “so it goes”, the character wild bob, and…

Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel full of motifs, ironies, black humor, as well as themes. The themes seen throughout the novel is sight, destruction of war, and lack of free will. Going more in depth, sight is a theme since the novel talks about being able to see clearly. During the novel, the destruction of war is mentioned quite a few times. Free will is the more obvious theme of the three and seen frequently throughout the entire novel. These three themes are seen in both the poem, A Man…