Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Analysis of ”Slaughterhouse-Five,” A Novel by Kurt Vonnegut “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the magnum opus of famed American author Kurt Vonnegut, is an inconsistently narrated story that could be interpreted to explain many different aspects of life, ultimately settling on the dominant theme of uncontrollable fate and the lack of free will humans have over their own eventual demises. Vonnegut writes the story from multiple perspectives—initially telling the story of the unnamed narrator, who then goes on to himself tell the story of Billy Pilgrim, the primary character of the novel. Vonnegut takes a remarkably apathetic approach to telling a rather dark story. Pilgrim himself personifies this tone, explaining his psyche early in the story: “Now, when I hear myself that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’” (44) The phrase, “So it goes,” is used whenever someone, or something, dies throughout the entire story—it is a phrase used 106 times, resulting in quite a lot of death and a rather uninterested approach to it. The novel is glaringly postmodernist—Vonnegut heavily utilizing a number of themes common to such a type of literature. Black humor prevails throughout the …show more content…
It openly addresses almost every common theme utilized in postmodernist literature and does so in a way that teaches the reader how to identify those concepts for future reading endeavors. Particularly, Vonnegut paints an incredibly interesting picture on the events of World War II from a more realistic perspective—where most works of fiction covering it are of the heroic acts of a soldier or group of soldiers, this novel provides an insight into the hopelessness of the real men who fought that war, and a glimpse of the cruel strings of fate that those soldiers likely believed they had no control