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How Does Vonnegut Dehumanize

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Mechanism in Breakfast of Champions When Vonnegut wrote the novel “Breakfast of Champions” it was a delicate time in our country and society, a lot of things were happening. Vonnegut uses racism, sex, and the simple and quite random drawings to dehumanize humans in his novel. Back when the book was written these issues were “normal”. For example to call African Americans a “Nigger”,ect. In his novel he succeeded using those themes to deprive a human from their actual qualities as a whole. For Vonnegut racism was one of the motifs typically easy to dehumanize a person. African Americans were used to being referred to as “Niggers”, that was their normal. There could be millions after millions of stories of the hate white people had towards African Americans. African American are downgraded as dirty, lazy, dumb and many other slures. “The white men wouldn’t do it either, of course. They called it women’s work, and …show more content…

Sex is another exposed motif he used. Vonnegut seems to say that sex is something humans charish. “Oh, Mr. Trout...teach us to sing and dance and laugh and cry. We’ve tried to survive so long on money and sex and envy and real estate and football and basketball and automobiles and television and and alcohol -- on sawdust and broken glass.” In reality sex is just something humans use to recreate another human being, it’s how we continue to keep the human species alive. Vonnegut tried to describe sex as human sexual urges to break us down piece by piece and make us feel less, mechanical, and routinized. He compares people to nothing more than a “fucking machine”. (Vonnegut) In the novel the narrator explains how Kilgore Trout’s work is filled for pornographic book and magazines. All his work is highlighted in public, which advertise “Wide Open Beavers Inside”. (Vonnegut) “It fills such a need, this machine,” said Trout of a film projector in an adult theater,”and it’s so easy to operate.”

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To even consider a white man feeling a type of sexual attraction to a black woman was unheard of. Even if the situation was switched around to a black man being raped by a white woman was unimaginable. That thinking mentality is what the foundation of white supremacy was built on. What the audience of this book might not now is that a big reason for the civil rights movement is in fact the mistreatment of African Americans, but the Jim Crow Laws and segregation fueled a lot of white supremacy. The equal but separate laws only confirmed that white was better and didn’t need to be mixed with the poor black people.

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If the African Americans were to disrespect the whites then the KKK would be involved and at the time both of the whites and African Americans were scared of the KKK, and feared what they would do. The African Americans had to address white people formally so; Miss, ms, mrs, sir, etc. Even if the whites were being racist and cruel toward the African Americans they couldn’t say anything out of pocket. Throughout the book it is seen that African Americans have to hide their voice, or their voice isn’t heard to begin with. If banning I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings because it has sensitive material then you’re banning the voices of African Americans and their overcoming of racism, even though racism is still a problem today.

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By contrasting Billy’s reactions with his own, Vonnegut conveys his

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Though Vonnegut has to hide his true feelings behind satire for the majority of “Harrison Bergeron,” we may get an indication of his true intent in George’s statement “pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again”(Vonnegut 228) if handicaps were eliminated. Hattenhauer points out that Vonnegut’s non-fiction stories are consistently leftist (387). Vonnegut dedicated his book, Hocus Pocus, to Eugene Debs, and used Debs’ quote, “While there is a lower class I am in it” (Hattenhauer 387). Debs’ quote is evident as to where Vonnegut’s views lie. “Vonnegut is considered to be a liberal thinker, not consistent with libertarian and conservative views” (Stuckey 85).

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For example, Tucker, one of the old men in the story, tells how a white mob beat his brother after he defeated them in a contest between his mules and their tractor. Then tucker asked them “How can flesh and blood and nigger win against white man and machine?”(96) They beat him brutally with stalks of sugar cane. Another example of white supremacy in the novel was when they put Gabel’s mentally ill son in an electric chair all because he was accused of raping. He was not but sixteen years old, half out of his mind, but still they put him in the electric chair on the word of a poor white girl.

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People are influenced by the events that surround them. Individuals transform into a product of their environment and experiences of the time. The literature and art often reflects the time period in which it is written in, and Vonnegut’s novel is no exception. The novel takes place during World War II, but is written during the time of the Vietnam War. With the Vietnam War, came a lot of anti-war propaganda.

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Trout uses science fiction and its different elements such as cognitive estrangement and structural fabulation in order to build a metaphor that guides the reader into thinking about an aspect of society that the author wants to criticize. This communicative piece intends to portray social criticism in the way Vonnegut does it, but taken to our reality and analyzing aspects we want to condemn. We opened the book on chapter nine and decided to write our own new plot as if Billy Pilgrim was the one reading it. We wrote the text and inserted it as part of the chapter in order to adhere it to the rest of society’s criticism seen in the book in the very best Vonnegut style. In order to interpret Vonnegut’s intentions and purpose of social criticism throughout Slaughterhouse Five, specially in chapter nine, it´s necessary to understand science fiction and its elements.

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To begin race has been a problem around the world for countless years. Although we have made it past many roadblocks there is still racism that affects us today. To start in the passage "The meaning of a word" the author goes into detail on how the word n**** can be used in many different ways including offensive ways. In the passage he says "But I didn't "hear it until it was said by a small pair of lips that had already learned it could be used in a way to humiliate me" (naylor 269). This shows how people aren't born racist it is taught.

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Some novel’s “sugar coat” the uglier parts of history to spare themselves the incrimination of being called racist. However, Steinbeck cannot be labeled a racist just because he remained true in history and how African American were treated. The Great Depression affected everyone but it really affected African American’s much worse.

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By writing Black Like Me, John Griffin was trying to write down everything he felt was important on his journey as a black man. One of the major things wrote down was the idea of white racism. Which is the belief that white people are superior to other races and because of that should run society. So, the main topic of the novel was social divide of whites and African Americans. As a black man John saw the contempt white people had towards African Americans, and just the overall condescending attitude emanated from these people.

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But, again, Vonnegut knew it would be powerful, and so he used it. By utilizing the principles and mechanics of messages and stories, Kurt Vonnegut achieves his goal of gaining our attention and

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Theodore Sturgeon, an American science-fiction and horror writer and critic, called Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle “appalling, hilarious, shocking and infuriating” and argued “it’s an annoying book and you must read it. And you better take it lightly, because if you don’t you’ll go off weeping and shoot yourself.” and this is a very accurate description of this Novel. Kurt Vonnegut has a very dark and twisted sense of humor in this book and it may not appeal to all people. You have to be a certain type of person that has the same sense of humor as Kurt Vonnegut to truly enjoy this humor and this novel.

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CONCLUSION Kurt Vonnegut started his career as a novelist for more than twenty years and expressed his own view and experience throughout the novels. From the novels Player Piano and Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut has used his literary works to portray the problem of the individual and he struggles to deals with the confusing, and oftentimes terrifying, aspects of life in the modern worlds. Kurt Vonnegut’s basic concern in these two novels is based on the complexities of human situation.

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Vonnegut uses oxymoron and the repetition of allusion to further idea, that to an extent, the truth, being as practical as it might, does not give humankind enough satisfaction, and it is actually in those deceptions one is given the vaguest illusion of value and

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The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).

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