Autobiography
Slaughterhouse-Five ain't a pure autobiography because, while it does have elements of the author's life in it, most of the narrative is focused on a fictional character, Billy Pilgrim. At the same time, many of Vonnegut's own experiences in Dresden, Germany, provide the engine for Slaughterhouse-Five's plot... so we think it deserves to be called a semi-autobiographical novel.
War Drama
Slaughterhouse-Five is also primarily about various aspects of war: (a) how much it sucks, (b) how much it messes people up after it happens, and (c) how generally unfair life is that we have to go fight in wars and then grow old and die afterwards (if we're lucky). So that's why we're also describing Slaughterhouse-Five as a war drama: not …show more content…
The constant confusion about when—or even whether—the different events of the novel happen mean that readers are constantly kept at some distance from Billy Pilgrim and his life story. By using the author as a character in the book and by telling Billy's story out of order, the novel itself keeps reminding us that Billy's story is fiction. This manner of storytelling indicates a degree of skepticism about the idea of a unified self or the possibility of realistic narration that characterizes …show more content…
And it's the narrator/author's real-life time in Dresden, Germany, that provokes him to write Slaughterhouse-Five in the first place. In Chapter 1, the narrator tells us that he and his wife spent some time after the war in Schenectady, New York, which Billy Pilgrim's "Ilium" seems to be based on. The parallels between the narrator and Billy's wartime and postwar experiences add to the sense that Slaughterhouse-Five, for all of its aliens and time-travel, is a pretty dang autobiographical novel.
Another recurring setting throughout the novel is the hospital. Billy spends his first night in the POW camp in the hospital, where he meets Edgar Derby while doped up on morphine. When Billy has his breakdown and checks himself into a veteran's hospital after the war, he meets fellow veteran Eliot Rosewater and discovers the science-fiction novels that will help him escape from his awful life for the next 30 years. And when Billy is recovering from his plane crash in a hospital in Vermont in 1968, he first begins saying the name "Tralfamadore"
Slaughterhouse-Five ain't a pure autobiography because, while it does have elements of the author's life in it, most of the narrative is focused on a fictional character, Billy Pilgrim. At the same time, many of Vonnegut's own experiences in Dresden, Germany, provide the engine for Slaughterhouse-Five's plot... so we think it deserves to be called a semi-autobiographical novel.
War Drama
Slaughterhouse-Five is also primarily about various aspects of war: (a) how much it sucks, (b) how much it messes people up after it happens, and (c) how generally unfair life is that we have to go fight in wars and then grow old and die afterwards (if we're lucky). So that's why we're also describing Slaughterhouse-Five as a war drama: not …show more content…
The constant confusion about when—or even whether—the different events of the novel happen mean that readers are constantly kept at some distance from Billy Pilgrim and his life story. By using the author as a character in the book and by telling Billy's story out of order, the novel itself keeps reminding us that Billy's story is fiction. This manner of storytelling indicates a degree of skepticism about the idea of a unified self or the possibility of realistic narration that characterizes …show more content…
And it's the narrator/author's real-life time in Dresden, Germany, that provokes him to write Slaughterhouse-Five in the first place. In Chapter 1, the narrator tells us that he and his wife spent some time after the war in Schenectady, New York, which Billy Pilgrim's "Ilium" seems to be based on. The parallels between the narrator and Billy's wartime and postwar experiences add to the sense that Slaughterhouse-Five, for all of its aliens and time-travel, is a pretty dang autobiographical novel.
Another recurring setting throughout the novel is the hospital. Billy spends his first night in the POW camp in the hospital, where he meets Edgar Derby while doped up on morphine. When Billy has his breakdown and checks himself into a veteran's hospital after the war, he meets fellow veteran Eliot Rosewater and discovers the science-fiction novels that will help him escape from his awful life for the next 30 years. And when Billy is recovering from his plane crash in a hospital in Vermont in 1968, he first begins saying the name "Tralfamadore"