Kilgore Trout

In the beginning of a person lives, their death can come at any moment. For young adults journeying through trying to find their meaning for existing often the times the answer can simply be that there is no meaning. One’s life is in reality signifys nothing because it all disappears once death calls their names.IN Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five we meet the question asked as; since life always ends in death, how can it have meaning?”…

Being a prisoner of war during World War II, Kurt Vonnegut over went through many traumatic incidents. Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Vonnegut himself, expresses these encounters through a first person stance by using the character of Billy. Many articles and reviews have been written analyzing the themes and overall success of the novel. Amongst them the perspective of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Susanne Vees-Gulani, whom believe the book was absolutely exceptional with the perspective of a…

Every individual’s life is made up of a collection of moments that all add up to the sum of that person’s identity. These moments can be traced in things such as photo albums, journals, but perhaps most profoundly are memories. In his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut presents the protagonist Billy Pilgrim in a series of time shifts that range from him being a small youth to an old man. As a result of these frequent shifts in space and time one may be inclined to think that Vonnegut…

This essay looks into a topic in which authors and directors have tried to paint their own versions of time travel. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a common mental trauma that concerns mainly those who participate in war/war veterans. Slaughterhouse Five goes into the affects of post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD for short), the consequences of those affects, and how veterans deal with PTSD differently. The time travel and aliens mentioned in this book are all part of a collection of…

Summary Slaughterhouse Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, details an account of the life of protagonist Billy Pilgrim. Told through a third person limited point of view, the story does not follow the traditional chronological pattern of storytelling, but rather is told through a number of flashbacks and instances of time-traveling that occur. Born in 1922, Billy Pilgrim grows up in Ilium, New York. He performs decently well during high school and ends up enrolling in the night classes taught at…

In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim follows a non-chronological journey while being “Unstuck in time”. As Billy is captured and held as a prisoner in a POW camp and then taken to Dresden during its bombing, he experiences many atrocities. Once the bombing was over, Billy and the other soldiers are put to work, digging up the diseased bodies of those who did not survive. After the war, Billy has trouble returning to his normal life, as he spends some time in a mental…

“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.” (Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing) Change has been humanity’s companion for centuries. There is no way to describe the world except as “ever-changing.” And the companion to change has always been words. Words have instigated change and words have recorded it. The instigation of change is what makes words so important. And change is ever constant during times of war and times of civil protest. The words of works like…

What is one to think when facing a book that seems science fiction on the surface, yet faces the harsh realities of a very real war within World History? Kurt Vonnegut, an American novelist, deals with various interwoven ideas and themes that are so contrasting to one another it is a wonder how he managed to work everything into one novel that spans just over two-hundred pages long. Slaughterhouse-Five is a diverse, intricate work that can be looked at from a multitude of perspectives. For the…

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five comments largely on the destructive nature of war. Our childlike protagonist Billy Pilgrim was essentially robbed of his innocence due to his drafting into the military. My first thoughts on this novel were about how Billy’s story extends to other soldiers and victims of war. The breaking of men and women’s’ ability to cope with the world extends far past the case of Billy. This is not just an isolated incident, it occurs much more often than most people care…

Slaughterhouse-Five is a remarkable novel written in 1969 by Kurt Vonnegut that displays the hardships of World War 2 through the experiences of the main protagonist Billy Pilgrim. It is a controversial novel that has created multiple perspectives (right and wrong) and one of those perspectives can be obtained in an article titled “Dystopian Cybernetic Environment in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse five” which is authored by three journalists Babaee, Yahya, and Sivagurunathan. The article…