Trout

Both Timothy Findley’s ‘The Wars’ and Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ delve into extreme detail on the absurdity and tragedy of war and life itself. The books and the characters within are often befuddled, bemused, or held subject to the mad whims of a world that is ultimately apathetic to whether they live or die. Both books utilize their unique narrative structures to emphasize the absurd nature of death by shaping the form in which information is presented around the intended message of…

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, the main character Billy discusses death numerous times and how it’s simply a part of life. To further go on, The Tralfamadorians also see death as just another aspect in life, “Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes’ (27). This quote talks about how the Tralfamadorians view death and that to them it is irrelevant. Vonnegut uses the phrase “So it goes”…

I. SUBJECT Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a cheerless tale of young Billy Pilgrim’s crusade through World War Two. Billy Pilgrim was an ordinary youth who went on to optometry school and was drafted into the United States Army. However, his life is turned upside down when he is captured by German soldiers during the war and he experiences his first journey through time. Years later, Billy claims to be abducted by the alien creatures from the distant planet of Tralfamadore. They reveal to…

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…

Slaughterhouse 5 and Brave New World Novels are ways that can be manifest to explain ideas or philosophical views that might influence other humans. Sometimes novels that have different type of theme or genre can have the casually of having same ideas but expressed differently according to the author wants to express. Slaughterhouse 5, written by Kurt Vonnegut, is a satirical novel that tries to mock war by making the reader followed the journey of the main character, Billy Pilgrim, in…

Slaughterhouse Five is narrated by the author in both first and third person. Mainly the first person sections being narrated confine the first and last chapters and are occasionally in the present tense when speaking from the personal point of view as Kurt Vonnegut. The tone of the narration is ironic and familiar to the reader. The narrator uncovers some dark humor in the novel as well as emotional material. He also prefaces a passage with “Billy says” to make a distinction between Billy’s…

Shortly into the novel Slaughter House Five, Billy Pilgrim became “lost in time” and cannot control where he travels and whether he is in the past, present, or future. Billy saw anything from his own birth, various experiences from his life, and his death. This is because of the harsh things Billy had to go through as a young soldier, which would later affect how he lived life. These events traumatically changed Billy, for better or for worse, and his character. Kurt Vonnegut develops the…

join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were…

My favorite aspect of this book was the way all of the themes worked symbiotically to create a very dynamic story. This book forced me to pay attention to the plot, something I can say about very few books. The complexity of Slaughterhouse-Five resided in the inability or unwillingness of Vonnegut to settle on a single theme or mode of discourse It took me until the end of the first chapter to discover what was going on; I even thought I had picked up the author’s edition by mistake.…