Criticism Of Kurt Vonnegut

The plot of Slaughterhouse- Five revolves around World War Two, especially the bombing of Dresden from a soldier’s perspective. Vonnegut vividly describes the destructive nature of war through accounts of ambush, mistreatment of prisoners of war, and massacres. However, he also expresses the mentally and emotionally damaging effects of war with the pure insanity of Billy Pilgrim. One of many instances illustrating Billy’s altered state of mind in the war is when he arrives in a prisoner of war camp. The English prisoners put on a production of Cinderella for their American guests and following a comical line Billy loses control. “He not only laughed – he shrieked. He went on shrieking until he was carried out of the shed into another, where the hospital was” (Slaughterhouse 98). This is a single example of the deplorable state of Billy’s mental sanity. The reader is already aware that Billy also begins to hallucinate and have crazy notions that he was abducted by aliens. Billy even acquires a sort of catchphrase that clearly demonstrates how emotionally distant Billy has become because of the war. Every time death is brought up, Billy has only one thing to say about it: “So it goes” (Slaughterhouse 214). This shows that Billy has become numb to pain, anguish, fear, and even life itself. To Billy, the end of the war did not actually bring freedom, but trapped him inside the horrors of his memories and deranged

SlaughterHouse-Five is a book about a man named Billy Pilgrim who is stuck in time, and constantly travels throughout different events in his life. Billy accepts different values and sees traumatic and morbid events differently than others. Billy accepts a way of life that is not perceivable to other humans. Many would argue that Billy’s experiences make him insane, but Billy’s experiences with the Tralfamadorians actually allows him to preserve his sanity, and stay a very intelligent man.

Vonnegut exercised a minimal and comical style of writing to communicate his views against war. His experience in high school and

Vonnegut calls upon his personal experiences to create his breakthrough work, Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut expresses his own feeling on war, family, and free will through the non-linear narrative of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. His experience as a soldier and death within his family are mirrored into Pilgrim’s character.

Every so often, a person comes along and encompasses the meaning of a generation. This person will capture everything people want to say, and then word it so well that his or her name becomes legendary. The sixties was an era with many of these people, each with his or her own means of reaching the people. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., armed with a typewriter and a motive, was amongst those that defined the sixties. Like other notable figures of the sixties, his strong opinions moved the people. Vonnegut’s opinions cover a wide range of topics and address almost all aspects of society. He represented the flower children of the sixties, as he

One of the most reoccurring discussions on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five seems to be on the meaning of the book. Straight into his

And how can you say a man had a good mind when he couldn’t even bother to do anything when the best-hearted, most beautiful woman in the world, his own wife, was dying for lack of love and understanding’” (48). Martin mocks the prevailing notion that Felix is a harmless, playful innocent. Vonnegut depicts how people admire Felix because he is not influenced by materialistic values. However, Martin correctly points out that he does not deserve praise for not desiring the values that drive others. Thus, Vonnegut persistently allows for subjugation of Felix’s family members and permits the perpetuation of his diabolical atrocities. While Vonnegut obscurely elicits Felix’s “destructive” innocence, he blatantly illustrates Lowe Crosby’s conceitedness.

We all wish we could travel through time, going back to correct our stupid mistakes or zooming ahead to see the future. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, however, time travel does not seem so helpful. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's main character, has come unstuck in time. He bounces back and forth between his past, present, and future lives in a roller coaster time trip that proves both senseless and numbing. Examining Billy's time traveling, his life on Tralfamadore, and the novel's schizophrenic structure shows that time travel is actually a metaphor for our human tendency to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of death.

Slaughterhouse Five is about a man, Billy Pilgrim, who suffers from a nervous breakdown and soon after becomes "unstuck in time". When this happens he travels through his past in Dresden and an outrageous future with aliens. He also gets to relive his loveless marriage and his life as an optometrist. On his trip with the Tralfamadorians, the aliens, he adopts their thought on death; no matter what happens in life there was no way that it could have happened any other way. Death is inevitable and you should treat it like any other thing that happens. The author, Kurt Vonnegut, suggest that human is doomed to slavey by machine. ( Babaee, 2014, pg. 6) Though it is not said in the book, Billy is known to have PTSD or Post Tramatic Stress Disorder. The novel gives an insight into Pilgim's mind.

Before one can fully understand Kurt Vonnegut's ideas and opinions about war, it is vital to know the history of Vonnegut as a prisoner of war. Vonnegut's troop was captured and taken to a camp in Germany in tiny and absolutely awful box cars

Sex is another element Vonnegut satirizes. Perhaps not to caution, but to reveal the twisted ways in which our current society treats sex. No doubt seen in every form of media and in every war, this theme can be found in Slaughterhouse-five and

As an author, Kurt Vonnegut has received just about every kind of praise an author can receive: his works held the same sway over American philosophy as did those of Jack Kerouac or J.R.R. Tolkein; his writing has received acclaim from academics and the masses alike; and three of his books have been made into feature films. Society has permanently and noticeably been altered by his writing. Through accessible language and easily-understood themes, Vonnegut has created works subtle, engrossing, and familiar. His main method for doing this is by exploiting a theme with which everyone is familiar and about which everyone has his own opinion: religion.

Through critical analysis, historical research, and textual evidence, a study on Kurt Vonnegut’s background will be conducted in order to display the effects that the era in which he lived had on his writing.

Slaughterhouse-five strives to remember the tragedy of the bombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut constructs his novel around a main character who becomes “unstuck in time” (23). Billy Pilgrim’s life is told out of order, which gives him a different perspective than the rest of the world. Billy lives through his memories, and revisits events in his life at random times and without warning. Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim to the Tralfamadorian way of thinking about memory and time so that he can cope with being unstuck in time. The Tralfamadorian ideology is set up as an alternative to the human ideology of life. In the novel Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut constructs a reality where memory is unproductive through the Tralfamadorian

Kurt Vonnegut was born in 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana to German parents. As a young man, Vonnegut wrote articles strongly opposing war for his high school newspaper, and the school newspaper of Cornell University, where he attended college (Allen 1). World War II broke out when he was just 16 years old, and at the age of 20, Vonnegut joined the US army. Speaking about his disdain for war, Novels for Students discloses,