Morality In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut’s, ‘Slaughterhouse 5’, represents yet another piece of revolutionary antiwar literature. Written by Vonnegut in 1969, and Drawing upon a style similar to that of Mark Twain this novel offers a more contemporary sense of morality. The author explains the story of Billy Pilgrim. This man lives a very diverse fictional life. Billy supposedly faced abduction by aliens from the planet named Trafalmadore. Which leads to his travel through the time stream of his own life. These aliens show Billy how minuet occurrences such as death actually are to the fabric of reality. A common phrase used by the antagonist as well as the aliens to describe certain happenings, ‘So it Goes’ truly goes to show the different perspective between the enlightened

‘There was something about death and the ninth day. There was a death on the ninth train ahead of Billy’s too. Roland Weary died-of gangrene that had started in his mangled feet.’ Eventually leading to the Bombing of Dresden, a devastating bombing on a large German city by the allied forces towards the wars end. As with, ‘Connecticut Yankee’, this truly casts a terrible view of the American war machine. Many lives were unnecessarily lost in Dresden on February 13, 1945 this has continued to be a trend of American warfare standards. According to Frederick Taylor the author of, Dresden Tuesday 13 February 1945’, ‘The extent and manner of the loss of human life, most of it by normal standards classifiable as innocent even if the city itself was not, still wrenches at the heart six decades later.’ Not only is a light shined upon the destructive capability war brings, but its deterioration of those who partake. Through his supposed experiences with the Trafalmadorians Pilgrim slips in and out of a depressing world. Though it is left to the reader to believe the sanity of Pilgrim, much of the occurrences are accounts of the time spent in the miseries of war. Going on to further express the author’s disagreements with war, but also providing fictional examples of his