Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five Analysis

402 Words2 Pages
Kurt Vonnegut’s classic anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi-autobiographical story about the bombing of Dresden during World War II. The novel follows Billy Pilgrim, an American prisoner of war, as he travels through time experiencing events before, during, and after the bombing. The writing style is odd because the author struggled writing directly about such a tragic event with such high death tolls. Throughout the novel, Kurt Vonnegut openly bends, breaks, and ignores the conventional rules of storytelling.
Kurt Vonnegut narrates the novel with no delineation between himself and Billy Pilgrim. For instance, he interjects when arriving at Dresden, “Somebody behind him in the boxcar said, “Oz.” That was I. That was me” (148). He