Billy Strayhorn

“No. My dad leaves bruises on the inside”(pg 70). In Ironman, Chris Crutcher, the author, shows physical and mental abuse through the main characters in this story. They have been abused internally or externally by either a parent or a close family member. The main characters, Bo and Shelly are affected by the continual bullying from the ones that are expected to protect them. Unfortunately, there’s a handful of children who experience this type of hardship throughout their lifetime. 5 Bo…

Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel, “Slaughterhouse Five” recounts his experiences of World War II through Billy Pilgrim, the main character. Vonnegut’s purpose is to describe his wartime experiences and antiwar view. He adopts a complex and elusive tone in order to successfully engage and entertain his readers. Vonnegut begins his novel in the first person. We are given a first-person point of view in the sections embedded in the first and last chapters of the book. Throughout the rest of…

Crazy people see crazy things becomes a true statement in Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut when a distressed book about a Billy Pilgrim’s life is impacted by what he saw and went through during the war. In Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Billy Pilgrim suffers from severe PTSD that leads him to time travel and being kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians. Slaughterhouse Five was first banned in Oakland County, Michigan and has been since 1972 according to Betsy Morais. The book should be allowed to be read…

The overall aim of this essay is to compare the film Sin City with the classic style of film noir to see if there are any differences or similarities between them. The analysis focuses on four concepts that I believe are the most classic film-noir associations. Lighting, Femme fatale, a dark world and the protagonist. Already in the first scene a couple of things are established. The first scene is part of a side story that we only get to see in the beginning and again at the end of the film,…

Even though film experts still debate what genre it best falls into, the 1950 Billy Wilder-directed film Sunset Boulevard is, in many respects, the archetypal film noir, and is also widely regarded as one of the most brutally honest depictions of Hollywood, by Hollywood. One of the biggest reasons Wilder’s film is viewed as such an exemplar of the film noir movement is its innovative use of lighting effects. Use of lighting can make or break a black-and-white film much more than it can one in…

privy to this information until it is revealed to them. For the reader, every new scene is exactly that, new. This bizarre exchange of information manifests in Pilgrim not only acknowledging his own death to the reader by stating directly that “I, Billy Pilgrim… will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976.” (Vonnegut 141), but even altering the structure of the story to convey this. For Pilgrim, his death is an arbitrary event. Thus, the location of his death in the…

Deep down, we are more excited by the attributes of the villain than those of the hero. Tyler Durden is the anarchist deep down all people want to be. He is grounded in reality, is a relatable person with worldly pain that rises to the challenge, and inspires thousands. Tyler is also a villain. The reader is more excited by the attributes of Tyler Durden than those of the narrator because deep down, humans love destruction, and Tyler does that best. Tyler makes people think, review their…

'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why’’ (Vonnegut 37) (Highlight is mine) Billy is questioning about everything to understand his life and his conditions; he wants logical answers for his questions but the answer of the tralfamadorian was 'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why’’ and…

3. Introduction to the Slaughterhouse-Five The ways we deal with our everyday life are different, some of us choose to deal with our problems and fight for the things which we want to achieve, but sometimes the reality in which we find ourselves is extremely cruel, perhaps each of us would have chosen to leave this reality through imagination. Fleeing from the cruel reality of war and the invention of a fictional planet is more or less the situation in which the main character of…

Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, brings a new aspect to the image revolving around time, life, and war, as well as how war is perceived. Vonnegut changes the glorified image of war and brings a never before experienced reality into his novel. In the words of noted scholar Josh Simpson, “Slaughterhouse-Five shows two things simultaneously with equally chilling clarity: what war and bad ideas can do to humanity” (Simpson 7). Like-minded, Dr. Ruzbeh Babaee adds, “Vonnegut’s dark…