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Book Report On Slaughter House Five By Kurt Vonnegut

714 Words3 Pages

Nour Hachemian
English
09/05/17
Slaughter House Five
Reading Assignment

Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut, is an anti-war book. The author mocks the war through a character named Billy Pilgrim, and he tells us the story of his crazy and adventurous time traveling. Kurt Vonnegut communicates his anti war principles, and demonstrates how sad and horrible war actually is, and the amount of destruction it can cause. He also explains in great detail the bombing of Dresden, and the after effects that it had on the city and the people. Kurt Vonnegut is able to go in such great depth, because he lived through the bombing himself, and was able to experience how horrible and devastating it is to be a soldier..

When Billy is visiting his old …show more content…

Billy sees that the city is covered in dead bodies, and Billy was forced to dig up the corpses “There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. […] Bodies weren’t brought up anymore. They were cremated by soldiers with flamethrowers right where they were” (Vonnegut, 214). The message that the author is trying to communicate with us, is how inhumane and cruel people can be to cause such destruction. For Vonnegut, the only thing that results in a war, is death and tragic …show more content…

These actions remind one of that of the Germans, because of all of their similarities. They both make Billy strip from his clothes, and they in-prison him somewhere where he can not get out. “Billy got of his lounge chair, went in the bathroom to take a leak. The crowd went wild.” (Vonnegut, 112) The only difference between the two is that being abducted by aliens is a better experience than being a prisoner of war. The Tralfamadorians treated Billy better than the Germans ever treated any soldier.

When Billy gets captured by the Germans, they lock him with other soldiers in a box cart “Human beings in there were excreting into steel helmets […] Human beings also passed canteens. Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down” (Vonnegut, 70). Vonnegut is exaggerating the “human beings”, to show us that the soldiers were not being treated like humans. The author is trying to say that nobody should go through this level of misery and

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Due to Billy and the narrators’ accounts you see the effects of war not only on the soldiers, but also on bystanders. Such as the girls in the bath house in Dresden who were most likely killed from the bombing. I think Vonnegut is showing how much pain war can cause. The predestination versus free will theme pops up most during Billy’s accounts of his times with the Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians see life as all moments are going on at once and will continue on a loop.

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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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In the novel ‘Slaughterhouse five’ written by Kurt Vonnegut we follow a man named Billy Pilgrim who became unstuck in time. He was a soldier during WW2 and became a prisoner to the Germans. Afterward he was send to Dresden, a nice town that doesn’t get involve in the war. As he’s about to be send out, an English soldier told him not worry about much as there’s no involvement of war activity in the town. However once he arrived the Americans bombed the town, blazing up in flame.

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He can't clarify or even remark on the passing and pulverization he has seen in Dresden. This reinforces the thought that war can have ghastly results even on the individuals who survive the war physically and return home as Vonnegut and even Billy Pilgrim do. Billy discovers his clarification of the shelling and the passing of such a large number

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The descriptions of the terrible deaths during the war were followed by this phrase. Pilgrim and Rosewater, both World War II veterans, think life is meaningless because of what they saw in the war (Vonnegut 101). Candles at the POW camp were made from the fat of Jews, Gypsies, communists, and fairies (Vonnegut 96). Billy is indifferent to the deaths of people close to him.

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Title: Slaughterhouse-Five Author: Kurt Vonnegut Thesis: Throughout KVs SF, he describes in matter of fact way the psychological impact/effects of the devastation of war and death upon Billy Pilgrim and how he handles it. Through the exploration of Billy Pilgrim’s detached and indifferent thoughts, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five illustrates the coping mechanisms of a World War II veteran with post traumatic stress disorder.

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It brings the reader's into a world of war and death and makes it normal; Many people see death as a bad thing, if they read this book they would be able to see how uncontrollable it is. Vonnegut writes billy as a very quiet, shy person who experiences about as much death as he had in his lifetime. Death and war are both things that no one can control, death happens to everyone one way or another and it’s how you see death that determines how you react to it. In the war Vonnegut and Billy both experience tremendous amounts of lose in such a little amount of time and when you experience that you are no longer in a state of mind where you feel as though death is unnatural and a horrible thing. they simply know what they can’t control and say this “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.”

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Vonnegut wanted to “try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it.” Vonnegut wanted to make a significant point across about the horrors of the war stating several times he is currently writing an anti war novel(******). The main character Billy is broken from the war, which is clearly stated in (*******). Showing what Vonnegut went through through Billy described the Dresden bombing as the worst bombing and experience that any prisoner of war had

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His desensitization is both an example of his struggles during the war and the PTSD that haunts him every day thereafter. If a soldier were to absorb every horror he saw, he would be incapable of surviving much longer than the war itself. Comparing Billy’s life of misery after World War II to those who were brutally slaughtered begs the question of who had the better end---the man who died young, or the man who, while still alive, doesn’t know how to live? The answer that Vonnegut conveys is that neither man wins. In war, there are no winners.

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