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Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: An Analysis

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A twenty-two year old prisoner of war emerges from the slaughterhouse where he works to see a formerly beautiful city reduced to nothing but rubble and embers. This man would go on to remove close to 30,000 corpses before seeing them incinerated. This experience would go on to haunt and plague Kurt Vonnegut for years on end. His experience of this event led him to write Slaughterhouse-Five, the story of Billy Pilgrim, who was also an American soldier who experienced the firebombing of Dresden and lived to tell about it. By drawing parallels between himself and Billy Pilgrim, providing philosophies and points of view, and recalling wartime events from WWII in the wake of a new war, Kurt Vonnegut brings many new concepts to the hypothetical table …show more content…

Vonnegut, like the hero of his story, was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and taken as a POW (“Kurt,” Writing). This capture brought Vonnegut to Dresden, where he experienced the massacre of the firebombings, and was “accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-Century apocalypse” (“At Last”). Much like Pilgrim, who also survived the same bombings, only because he “was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed” (Vonnegut 226). Vonnegut, struggling to write about Dresden, found a way to do so in exploring the experience through Pilgrim’s eyes. Though not exclusively, as Roland Weary, another character, also shares some traits with Vonnegut. While he was writing the novel, Vonnegut wished to reminisce with an old veteran buddy, common among many veterans of the war. However, as he arrived, he was not treated to a warm, dark, fire-lit room where “two old soldiers could drink and talk” (Weiner). Vonnegut mentions early on that some of the other lesser details of the story are just as true as the rest: “One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war” (Vonnegut 1). Paul Lazzaro, the new identity given to an actual fellow POW, tells Billy that anyone who tries to touch him should kill him, lest Lazzaro have them killed in return (Vonnegut 175). Billy, after surviving the dreadful events of the novel that far, was just as traumatized by Lazzaro’s story of revenge against a dog. Similarly, he later reminisces about “the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby,” who was caught “with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs” before being “tried and shot” (Vonnegut 274). These parallels of Pilgrim and Vonnegut highlight the events of both men 's lives,

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Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut intertwines reality and fiction to provide the reader with an anti-war book in a more abstract form. To achieve this abstraction, Kurt Vonnegut utilizes descriptive images, character archetypes, and various themes within the novel. By doing so, he created a unique form of literature that causes the reader to separate reality from falsehood in both their world, and in the world within Vonnegut’s mind. Vonnegut focuses a lot on the characters and their actions in “Slaughterhouse Five.”

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He brings his experience from the bombing of Dresden and recalls his encounters during the tragedy. Through the subject of Billy, he describes the aftermath of man’s destructive power through the bombing, “It looked like Dresden after it was fire-bombed-like the surface of the moon” (). From this quote, he paints a true sight of war where nothing is left but dust. He relates this event to emphasize the fact that war is a place of sadness and despair and from Billy’s viewpoint he observes the hurtfulness and all the destructiveness of the world when the city of Dresden gets

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To understand the history of past cultures, it is imperative that both sides are heard. Many novels continually showcase this new outlook on history. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, demonstrates the New Historicism perspective with subjective accounts, reflections of the time it is written, and lack of the opposing side ’s outlook. To begin, New Historicism is showcased by subjective accounts that are apparent in developing the

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SlaughterHouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has a strong, recurring theme of how disastrous war is and the effects it has on a person. In this novel's case, Billy Pilgrim and even the narrator are showing obvious signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Although this topic is quite serious in some situations, Billy Pilgrim doesn't seem to know he has this disorder and his thoughts and actions are comical at times. The idea of traveling to a distant planet named Tralfamadore is very unlikely and its most reasonable to say Billy made it up. Towards the ending of the novel, Billy releases the information about his trip to the “book store” and his knowledge of the books by Kilgore Trout.

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Those who can handle the brutal, relentless subject of death should definitely give this book a read to experience the ruthless bombing of Dresden, a little known occurrence, and to experience World War Two as told accurately and

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However, the vast majority of the novel is written in a third-person narrative, with the narrator narrating the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim’s, life in a non-linear manner. This seemingly- omniscient narrator however, intrudes unabashedly throughout the story on several occasions by reinforcing his participation and witnessing of the ongoing events through the statement, “I was there” (pg. 67; 212), thereby authenticating his narrative. The narrator attempts to narrate the novel through the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim’s, point of view. This is suggested when an American POW “had excreted everything but his brains” on the train to Dresden (pg. 125)-

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While Billy is writing his paper, the temperature in the rumpus room plummets. Vonnegut conveys how pathetic Billy is, through irony, by stating, “A mouse had eaten through the insulation of a wire leading to the thermostat” (35). The mouse is an ironic subject for initiating the extreme change in Billy’s condition/comfort. The temperature dropped to 50 degrees because a small and insignificant animal chewed on a wire, and Billy did absolutely nothing about the mouse or even the temperature. Again, the seeming indifference Billy has about his life is portrayed through the fact that even a creature of its diminutive size affected his welfare and he did not care.

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(Vonnegut 2). Having forgotten one of the most important parts of his life, it hints at how pointless war is and how something as big as Dresden can be forgotten as time goes on. Billy Pilgrim

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As a narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut writes articulately,

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Slaughterhouse-Five examines the similarities with Vonnegut and Norman Mailer making himself a character in The Armies of the Night, Vonnegut used his own real-life experience in surviving the Dresden bombing to establish authorial legitimacy. Like Mailer, also Vonnegut discusses the reasons why he was writing this book and the difficulties he encounter remembering war experiences. When Vonnegut appears as

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The narrator explores much of the protagonist’s life. Although, he emphasizes Pilgrim’s war experiences and the negative impacts they imposed on him that followed him to his death. The conflict begins when Billy and the other soldiers are taken as prisoners of war and forced to live in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. During this period, the city is burned down by an unseen firebomb attack. Billy escapes this momentous occasion by hiding out in a locker, scared.

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On the other hand, Billy gets away with keeping a diamond. It is worth considering the fact that Vonnegut finished Slaughterhouse-Five more than twenty years after the war was over so we should not forget the fact that Vonnegut always writes from the survivor’s point of view, many years away from the fury of the war and he has the accommodation to laugh, to satirize, ironies with war and all the laughter has to be a step away from madness of the war. As a result of making the death of Edgar Derby as the climax of the novel, Vonnegut doesn’t minimize the destruction of Dresden but he succeeded to reveal the injustices of the war by showing the fate of only one individual in the war. Vonnegut shifts the attention of readers through irony from the destruction of whole city and the death of ten thousands to the execution of an American soldier Edgar Derby for picking up a teapot out of ruins: Derby’s crime is so minuscule in comparison with the larger crime of destroying an undefended city that if death is the proper punishment for his actions, what punishment should be given to those responsible for burning Dresden? rightly asks Tom Hearron

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Black humor is a mode of artistic expression in literature, drama and film in which usually serious or tragic subject such as war, death, atrocity are treated in darkly comic fashion in order to express the cruelty or absurdity of the contemporary world. Humor can also be a natural outcome of fear and it is not surprising if some dire events in Vonnegut’s narratives incite laughter rather than tears. Then, Vonnegut believes in laugh less jokes or what some critics prefer to call „black humor‟. “True enough,” Vonnegut admits, “there are such things as laugh less jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.” Vonnegut chose dark or black humor to describe a reality that goes beyond human imagination.

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Knowing that 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War immediately brought me back to the days which I delved into the book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut for a course at Peking University, China when I was one of the two chosen students from Macao Polytechnic Institute to study there as an exchange student. It was not long when I was enlightened and became certain of my specialisation in literature－Psychoanalysis. In my preparation of a Master’s degree, I have studied widely around the topic Literature and Psychoanalysis. I hope to examine closely the complexity of the human psyche and its literary presentations and constructions.

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