Loneliness In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote the anti-war book, Slaughterhouse Five. The main aspect the book focuses on is the firebombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945 by the Allied Powers, during the second world war. As Vonnegut writes, he has a defined way a telling a story. He writes in third person, but in a way where he, as the author, is written into the story as one of the characters. Since this semi-autobiographical novel is written on such a traumatizing topic, the tone of his book leads the reader to realize that loneliness is the effect of keeping one's feelings to themselves about a shocking event. As Vonnegut writes, the reader is able to tell that he personally faced World War II. In fact, he was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany like the

Although Vonnegut wrote himself into the story, Billy would represent Vonnegut if he had not written the story. If he had not written this story, he could have ended up alone, like Billy. Billy goes through the war ending up as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. They get locked up underground when the fire-bombing occurs. Billy is traumatized by this event, and Vonnegut writes in a blunt manner to represent to the audience that war is very critical and blunt as well. Once Billy gets back, he becomes “...unstuck in time,” (Vonnegut 23), or in other words, he has found himself traveling around to different times. A place Billy often visits is back in Dresden, so when, “Billy [thinks] hard about the effect the quartet had on him…” (Vonnegut 177), he sees that as he goes into the past, to the internment camp, he was lonely and the only people alongside him were the guards, or in Vonnegut’s metaphor the quartet. The guards kept the other prisoners separated from each other to refrain from conversations. Meaning when Billy is back in reality, he realizes that since he has no one to talk to, nothing has changed from the