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Pilgrim's Slaughterhouse Five

Decent Essays

Theme and Subject Vision plays a large role in this story. Pilgrim studied optometry before and after the war, and after his brief-ish stay at a mental institution, he decided to become an optometrist forever. The way others portray Pilgrim is dependent on his environment. While being held hostage by the philosophically advanced Tralfamadorians, he is treated condescendingly since Earthlings are inferior to them. To his peers back on Earth, he doesn’t fit any criteria for being “normal”, and takes things as they come (e.g. he does not resist the Germans or the Tralfamadorians). In the end, he did not care for his death because he agreed with the Tralfamadorian vision that when you die, you are still living in a different timeline. His baby boomer daughter, Barbara, doesn’t see past his PTSD and ignores the fact that he can’t properly recover from his trauma. The study of eyes is a literal symbol of how …show more content…

Sitting in Debnam’s class pushing through this book really made me think about how I used to use University of Arizona’s summaries of Sirens of Titan last semester. Slaughterhouse Five had a convoluted, hard-to-maneuver writing style. In between its reoccurring “***”’s and “So it goes.”’s, I found that the story sounded the same as his others. Vonnegut always jumps around different time periods, but to be fair, the main character Billy Pilgrim was kidnapped by Tralfamadorians and his last name coincidentally is “Pilgrim”. For the most part, Slaughterhouse Five follows this pilgrim throughout different parts of his life (again, not in chronological order), with the exception of the first chapter where Vonnegut removes himself from the story and reminisces on his own life. The story bounces between the bombings in Dresden, the optometry school in New York, and Tralfamadore, highlighting significant points in Pilgrim’s life that make him who he turned out to be before being shot under Paul Lazzaro's

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