Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five : Maturity Or Stupidity?

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut could easily be imagined as a car. The car itself is a 1995 Dodge Caravan, made up of mismatched parts and one can tell that it has been through a lot and is barely scraping by. There are many parts to Slaughterhouse-Five (just like a car), which can be confusing if one does not take the time to carefully read over the novel. The driving force behind Slaughterhouse-Five can be identified as the novel’s author, Kurt Vonnegut, as Vonnegut pushes the story further and directs the storyline at his own pace.

In order to illustrate the devastating affects of war, Kurt Vonnegut afflicted Billy Pilgrim with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which caused him to become “unstuck in time” in the novel. Billy Pilgrim illustrates many symptoms of PTSD throughout the story. Vonnegut uses these Slaughterhouse Five negative examples to illustrate the horrible and devastating examples of war. The examples from the book are parallel to real life experiences of war veterans, including Vonnegut’s, and culminate in a very effective anti-war novel.

“It is so short and jumbled and jangled... because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”(Chapter 1). World War II, years of war that saw young men, or children, go into battle, many never to return. A massacre that will leave a scar on this earth that will never truly heal. Kurt Vonnegut attempts to capture the hostility of this war, which he was a part of, in “Slaughterhouse-five”. A primary theme of the novel is war is cruel and childish. Vonnegut does not glorify war or make anyone sound heroic, he describes war as undisciplined and a cataclysm for everyone involved. There were victims on all sides of the battlefield, no one was a true winner, and it all could have been avoided if people could stand to work things out

Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut uses Billy Pilgrim to mirror how people cope with trauma and disillusionment. Upon Billy’s return from war, he is diagnosed with PTSD, and eventually creates Tralfamadorians to help him make sense of his world. The aliens teach him to use the phrase, so it goes, whenever he hears of tragedies or death; however, over the course of the novel the maxim transitions from being an anecdote used to accept how the world works into a warning that presages how the world will end.

War is a bad thing. But it can be more and less. War is defined by many words. Heroic, stoic, a struggle, meaningful. The word that Vonnegut would describe as war is absurd.

It is expected for arguments to arise when writing about controversial topics. Many times the meaning of a book is not as obvious as the author intended, which may lead to problems. Other times, books are challenged because they contain sexual or inappropriate material. When Kurt Vonnegut released Slaughterhouse-Five critics were quick to judge his peculiar way of writing. Although Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five was oftentimes misunderstood, interpreted as inappropriate, and judged for the peculiar point of view, critics seem to appreciate and accept one aspect of it: the structure of the book.

War is a tragic experience that can motivate people to do many things. Many people have been inspired to write stories, poems, or songs about war. Many of these examples tend to reflect feelings against war. Kurt Vonnegut is no different and his experience with war inspired him to write a series of novels starting with Slaughter-House Five. It is a unique novel expressing Vonnegut's feelings about war. These strong feeling can be seen in the similarities between characters, information about the Tralfamadorians, dark humor, and the structure of the novel.

Billy Pilgrim is the person that the book is written around. We follow him, perhaps not in a straight order, from his youth joining the military to his abduction on the alien planet of Tralmalfadore, to his older age at his 1960s home in Illum. It is his experiences and journeys that we follow, and his actions we read about. However, Billy had a specific lack of character for a main one. He is not heroic, he has very little personality traits, let alone an immersive and complex character. Most of the story is written around his experiences that seem more like symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his World War Two days, combined with hallucinations after a brain injury in a near-fatal plane

Kurt Vonnegut was a man of disjointed ideas, as is expressed through the eccentric protagonists that dominate his works. Part cynic and part genius, Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliance as a satirist derives from the deranged nature of the atrocities he had witnessed in his life. The reason Vonnegut’s satire is so popular and works so well is because Vonnegut had personal ties to all the elements that he lambasted in his works. Vonnegut’s experience as a soldier in WWII during firebombing of Dresden corrupted his mind and enabled him to express the chaotic reality of war, violence, obsession, sex and government in a raw and personal manner. Through three works specifically, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” “Harrison Bergeron,” and Slaughterhouse-five,

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..

War is something that can be classified as an art like Vonnegut expressed or a tragedy that ends with a dance with death. Vonnegut shows an opinion on being blunt and showing no remorse to death. It is as if he himself feels numb on the subject of tragedy and destruction because he has experienced both. So it goes; no questioning, lack in curiosity, and lack of empathy. All play into a combined question of why would anyone need to dwell on something that has already occurred?

Where innumerous catastrophic events are simultaneously occurring and altering the mental capability of its viewers eternally, war is senseless killing. The participants of war that are ‘fortunate’ enough to survive become emotionally distraught civilians. Regardless of the age of the people entering war, unless one obtains the mental capacity to witness numerous deaths and stay unaffected, he or she is not equipped to enter war. Kurt Vonnegut portrays the horrors of war in Slaughterhouse Five, through the utilization of satire, symbolism, and imagery.

Another example of this technique, which is frequent all over the novel is the topic of three musketeers which Vonnegut recalls in the first chapter when one of his colleagues is eating a chocolate called “a three Musketeers Candy bar”, he mentions it again in chapter five page 129, when Billy’s wife Valencia eats the same candy bar. It seems that the name of this chocolate reminds Vonnegut about the war and his friends which used to call their little group in the war “The Three Musketeers”. Slaughterhouse-Five attacks the preconceived belief that war and its members represent bravery, glory or heroism.

Many people returned from World War II with disturbing images forever stuck in their heads. Others returned and went crazy due to the many hardships and terrors faced. The protagonist in Slaughter-House Five, Billy Pilgrim, has to deal with some of these things along with many other complications in his life. Slaughter House Five (1968), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is an anti-war novel about a man’s life before, after and during the time he spent fighting in World War II. While Billy is trying to escape from behind enemy lines, he is captured and imprisoned in a German slaughterhouse. The author tells of Billy’s terrible experiences there. After the war, Billy marries and goes to school to

Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Slaughterhouse-Five, an antiwar book that took 23 years to write, is not what he thought it would be. He explained early on to