Kurt Vonnegut Literary Analysis

Throughout history, man has shown a great tendency to gravitate towards decisions that end in destruction, especially if the destruction will not directly affect himself. Occurences such as war declarations do not necessarily have to be decided on by the masses, but only a single man’s will. By that man’s will, millions of innocent lives can be lost, his own usually not included. Kurt Vonnegut is a fantastic author that uses satire in order to draw attention and ridicule the flaws of mankind, most of which end in destruction and chaos of some sort. In two of his novels, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, damage and destruction of millions is determined by what can potentially be a single man’s decision. Vonnegut himself experienced the bombing of Dresden, about which he wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, first hand. He was taken by the Germans as a prisoner of war and by chance managed to survive by escaping with a few others and seeking asylum in an underground meat locker (Allen par. 2). Although …show more content…
Many soldiers who fight in wars do not return in the same mental state as they left. Billy Pilgrim has no top secret war stories during his experience in combat. After the war, Billy has very little to hide. However, what he does have to hide was his knowledge of the damages and the obvious mortality exposed to him during war (Allen par. 17). The men who sign up for wars likely are not certain of exactly what they are signing up for. The soldiers end up seeing damage and destruction to an extent that, hopefully, no normal civillian would ever have to see. The damage caused during Dresden is accurately described in the book when Billy Pilgrim observes that “There was a fire storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame that ate everything organic, everything that would burn”