Life and death are cyclical, that is the reason history cannot seem to stop repeating itself. History is like a mutated cell that repeats the cycle an infinite amount of times, never stopping for anyone. Slaughterhouse-Five is a non-fiction book written by Kurt Vonnegut about the non-stopping, cyclical nature or life and death, and the uselessness of war. I appreciated Slaughterhouse-Five because it is an extraordinary book characterized by the use of repetition, emotions, and simplicity.
To represent the cyclical nature of life, Vonnegut uses repetitive phrases and allusions. The most famous of the phrases being, “so it goes”(Vonnegut 2). It is said after every encounter with death religiously. The New Yorker concludes that, “the inanity of the phrase suggests how futile it is to try to discover an appropriate response to either a single
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A review by the New York Times reads, “Mr. Vonnegut pronounces his book a failure ‘because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.’ He’s wrong and he knows it”(“At Last, Kurt Vonnegut’s Famous Dresden Book” 1). I completely agree with the review; his book was extremely successful. It became popular because it was released during the Vietnam War, so peace advocated fell in love with the book. Vonnegut stirred emotions of peace in his readers. The combination of the current war and the amount of thought and work put into this book is evident, and that is why it is one of Vonnegut’s most well known works of literature. Slaughterhouse-Five definitely deserves to be critically recognized because the words written on the pages have and always will be relevant. Vonnegut acknowledges it himself, when he says, “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist”(Vonnegut 27). He knows that war will always be relevant; because it has always existed, it will always