A Book Report on Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Since the first time Billy claimed to have come unstuck in time while in the forest leaning against a tree, he has depended on an alternate reality in which he has created a new life for himself to avoid thoughts of the horrific events he witnessed while in Dresden. Although Billy claims that he was abducted by the Tralfamadorians, in reality, he was captured by the Germans. The reason that the Tralfamadorians exist is so that Billy can escape from the harsh reality of being a prisoner of war. Although separate in Billy’s conscience, the Nazis and the Tralfamadorians are interchangeable. Billy’s adventures on Tralfamadore all have significant and undeniable connections to his life:

Billy Pilgrim's life is far from normal. Throughout most of his adult life he has been moving backwards and forwards through time, from one event to another, in a non-sequential order. At least, this schizophrenic life is hard to understand. Because Vonnegut wants the reader to relate to Billy

Americans often refer to World War II as the good war. Allied troops fought Hitler and citizens welcomed them home with countless parades. But, many events that occurred during the war were often overlooked because they casted a bad light on the American war effort. The bombing of Dresden, Germany is one of the most notable examples of America ignoring it's past. In Slaughterhouse Five, the protagonist Billy Pilgrim bears witness to the atrocities of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut uses action, diction, and style in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five to critique America’s inability to accept the events of World War II.

When he went to tell ex-PFC Wintergreen his theory though, he was pushed away. It was if he didn’t care to think about the situation. This shows the lack of respect for another human life. This can also be seen in SlaughterHouse V. One of the things Billy thinks about is the value of human life. The question he asks is how can God not value the life of people and let them be slaughtered. What he was referring too was the concentration camps that he was in and saw people die at and the bombing of Dresden where many people lost their lives. Billy Pilgrim felt that if God loved his people that he wouldn’t allow this to happen. So therefore there would be no God because the God that people have learned about, loves everyone and would certainly not allow harm to anyone. This definitely takes aim at religion and basically sees how much faith a person might have in God despite the evil he sees around him. Another take on it is that why does God want people to be miserable. This is seen by Doc Daneeka constantly asking "Why Me". She talks about Hungry Joe and how Yossarian is constantly worries about Hungry Joe. She starts out by sarcastically saying that she has no stress. She says that she knows there is a war and there are people suffering. She can’t figure out why she has to be one of them. Another theme and imagery used in Catch 22 is the prison

While never a defeatist, Billy merely flows through his disjointed life without much heed to the event at hand. Billy realizes that he holds the power to create his own happiness and satisfaction out of life through appreciation of the present moment rather than contemplate the occurrence of past and future. Vonnegut develops Billy Pilgrim as a unique protagonist as a means of forcing the reader to question the application of free will upon society and gain a new perspective on the beauty of the present.

The phrase “so it goes” is repeated 106 times in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. From “dead” champagne to the massacre at Dresden, every death in the book is seemingly equalized with the phrase “so it goes”. The continuation of this phrase ties in with the general theme on indifference in the story. If the Tralfamadorian view of time is correct, then everyone is continuously living every moment of their life and dying is not the end. However, if Vonnegut believed in this idea, then he wouldn’t have felt compelled to write about the firebombing of Dresden. It is clear that both Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut are affected by the massacre they saw, but they have different ways of rationalizing it. Billy finds comfort in the Tralfamadorian view of life, whereas Vonnegut disagrees, and urges the reader to disagree too. The constant repetition of “so it goes” breaks the reader away from the Tralfamadorian point of view, and allows them to come to their own conclusion that although it would be nice to forget the bad parts of life, it is important to remember all of the past. Vonnegut helps the reader come to this conclusion by repeating the phrase after gruesome moments, and showing how meaningless life can be if the Tralfamadorian ideas are believed, as seen through Billy Pilgrim’s bland life..

The story of Slaughterhouse Five is about a man named Billy Pilgrim who goes through a series of strange events throughout his life time. And it all starts when he is in a war in Germany. Billy is resentful towards the war and he makes it clear that he does not want to be there. During the war, he becomes captured by Germans. Before Billy is captured, he meets Roland Weary. When captured, the Germans took everything from Weary, including his shoes so they gave him clogs as a substitute. Eventually, he dies from gangrene caused by the clogs. Right before Weary dies, he manages to convince another soldier; Paul Lazzaro that it was Billy’s fault that he was dying so Lazzaro vows to avenge the death of Weary by killing Billy.

4. Slaughterhouse-Five takes place in Germany during the 1940s and in the fictional town, “Ilium,” New York. One recurring setting that comes up throughout the novel is the hospital.

Billy is considered to be the personification of the idea of free will being an illusion. This theme and characteristic of Billy Pilgrim is relatable to the first line of the Serenity Prayer, “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” Billy takes this suggestion to the extreme by accepting everything as within the realm of “things I cannot change.” One

“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations,” (85) And Vonnegut even test this by giving Billy the ability time traveling. Although Billy travel in time, he cannot change what happened in the past. In fact he sees his death, but can’t do anything to change it. “I, Billy Pilgrim will die, have died and always die on February thirteenth, 1976” (140) This unchangeable of time shows that proceed from past to future and nothing can change the sequence of this progression. This is like the domino’s movement its movement determined by the laws of physics everything is bounded in each other if you take one domino out than the movement will stop in this case if we change the past there will be no future. Ironically even Tralfamadorians do live in time, they still struggle against constraints on their free-will and this is almost hilarious for us humans who believe that we actually have free-will and can change our future. As a conclusion Kurt Vonnegut planned to juxtapose the free-will and the Tralfamadorian belief determinism by using symbolism.

On the other hand, the reason Vonnegut only talked about the life story of Billy on Tralfamadore was because he wanted to present his unique point of view about time and free will. There, the Tralfamadorians taught Billy that they did not want to make any changes or to do anything, since they already believed that everything had been determine, no matter in past, present, or future. In their point of view, they thought every single event would always happen, and they could not make any changes to it, so that they tried to “Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones” (55). Through this philosophy, it helped Bill felt better toward deaths and the awful things he had experienced in his past life.

Defining post-modern works, can be daunting, but the main traits of post-modernism are embracing skepticism and overturning conventions. With this in mind, Kurt Vonnegut explores war drawing parallels from his own past experience and depicts it through his character Billy Pilgrim allowing the reader to see the dichotomy in reality and fiction, separating his novel from the normal layout of a linear novel. Also, Slaughterhouse-Five discusses the controversial military action as a post-modern novel, as it brings many perspectives to the bombing of Dresden and modern warfare more broadly, while acting like a post-modern novel that illustrates paradoxes. Slaughterhouse-Five illustrates the ideal of a post-modern novel as it experiments with the ideas of reality versus truth, free will, and frame breaking within the novel, to suggest a better understanding of the effects of war.

The destructiveness of war may be obvious, but the ways it affects the people in it, society, and people who have came after the war is subtle. The main character Billy Pilgrim may be benefiting from post war life with a successful optometrist business and being the president of the Lions Club, but this is not because of his skills or ingenuity. It is because of his father in law’s wealthy clout. Billy’s experiences with the alien Tralfamadorian shows how much Billy has been affected by his experiences in the war. The war has warped Billy’s mind so much that he is now hallucinating as a way to cope and escape from the real world. The way the book shifts between experiences in Billy’s lifetime peers into the mind of a soldier who has had a catastrophic

The Tralfamadorians, who explain this nature of time and existence to Billy, are shown as enlightened creatures while the humans back on earth are seen as backwards -- to such an extent that they believe in free will. Billy towards the end of his life becomes a preacher of these virtues of existence taught to him by his zookeepers on Tralfamadore, going around and speaking about his experiences and his acquired knowledge. This is ironic, because he is attempting to reverse the steady path of life, even time itself.

Due to the fact that Billy Pilgrim is essentially Kurt Vonnegut, it is indicated that Billy faces much depression and misery. Since depression and misery are very pessimistic traits, Billy goes into the fantasy world. He escapes to the planet of Tralfamadore. After the war “when he was abducted by the Tralfamadorians...” (Vonnegut 75) Billy became unchained, escaping from the generic world around him. At that point in time Billy starts to see life in a very offbeat way. Instead of having recurring thoughts of war, “Billy finds meaning and importance in some aspects of life”