-In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five a reflection of moments of the life of the author himself shows Vonnegut’s own view of war expressed in a comically depressing manner. The novel follows the life of Billy Pilgrim who is enlisted in the army at the age of 21 to fight the Germans in WW2 and is later captured and taken to POW camp in Dresden which is later bombed. Billy survives the bombing and is witness to the destruction of thousands of innocence from this he becomes unhinged able to visit his past and being abducted by the Tralfamadore who teach him that there is no free will and your life is predetermined by other but even when you pass you remain forever in the past. So it goes. Billy was created to express Vonnegut’s own anti-war
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“You were just babies in the war… You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies… So we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs” (14 Vonnegut). What these quote shows are the ones to go to war are not old men but children who are sent to fight a war that old men have started. Vonnegut includes this to show the soldiers used to fight the war were but young men in their twenties just starting their life this is why Vonnegut’s novel also has another title “The Children’s Crusade” as he calls it to emphasize who fought and died in this war. Billy Pilgrim shows use the physical and mental toll war took on him at just the age of 21 years’ old of being the witness to the slaughter of thousands of lives in Dresden and the injuries sustained on the battlefield. The starvation of our soldiers our children faced on foreign soil, away from their family’s dying and suffering alone of disease and injury for a war that was started by their parent’s generation. Yet if you were in your thirty or forty you were seen to be too old to be a soldier such as Edger Derby who was executed and buried by
“You were just babies in the war… You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies… So we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs” (14 Vonnegut). What these quote shows are the ones to go to war are not old men but children who are sent to fight a war that old men have started. Vonnegut includes this to show the soldiers used to fight the war were but young men in their twenties just starting their life this is why Vonnegut’s novel also has another title “The Children’s Crusade” as he calls it to emphasize who fought and died in this war. Billy Pilgrim shows use the physical and mental toll war took on him at just the age of 21 years’ old of being the witness to the slaughter of thousands of lives in Dresden and the injuries sustained on the battlefield. The starvation of our soldiers our children faced on foreign soil, away from their family’s dying and suffering alone of disease and injury for a war that was started by their parent’s generation. Yet if you were in your thirty or forty you were seen to be too old to be a soldier such as Edger Derby who was executed and buried by