Quotes From Slaughterhouse Five

Slaughterhouse - Five. Just hearing that name almost gives me a feeling that this book might be ominous or thrilling. But let us not judge a book by its cover. At first this book doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Vonnegut starts out by saying “All this happened, more or less.” This enticed me, I thought maybe the book would be like a part grisly war tale. Alas, Vonnegut seems to always find a way to take your expectations and flip them upside down and spin it around for a bit. In this essay I want to talk about that, I want to examine what he does to throw off my expectation and, I also wish to dive deeper to find the hidden messages in the story.

If you ever ask anyone what they remember most, like a certain quote perhaps, about Slaughterhouse

“His father died of a hunting accident during the war. So it goes.” (Vonnegut 24) This was the first time Billy and the motif so it goes was mentioned. It is not meant to go unnoticed that the motif was used after mention of the death of Billy’s father. It should also be mentioned that Billy loses many people in his life, his friends, his wife, and all of his colleagues on a plane. It is safe to say Billy has a tough life. Billy is also constantly surrounded by dead people in the war as well. “Billy found the afternoon stingly exciting. There was so much to see-dragon’s teeth, killing machines, corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory. So it goes.” (65) This quote shows almost how oblivious Billy is. I mean the kid is excited to see a bunch of dead peoples feet. My point here, Billy has had a tremendously tragic life. He watched people die around him countlessly and Billy would always come out unscathed and unaware. Or maybe he wasn’t so

So Billy has had this terrible life. He is a boring regular old average joe, doesn’t do anything really special. Think about this boring unattractive little kid who all of a sudden gets sent off to war. He doesn’t just get sent to war though, he gets sent to the biggest war in history. In war Billy is a chaplain's assistant that doesn’t even know if he believes in god and questions it constantly. Okay so I’m building a formula right here. You have this weird, boring, and confused kid in a massive war and he sometimes questions existence. Then this kid gets lost behind enemy lines. He is beyond terrified and basically just gives up on life in the woods. Now before I continue have you ever heard of PTSD? It is a disorder you can develop in which you have difficulties processing and recovering from terrifying events. This disease is most commonly found in veterans. Back to Billy, he is now in a situation that any person would be terrified, not to mention he is a loser kid who just lost his dad. While Billy is dying in the woods he closes his eyes and “time travels” for the first time. “His attention began to swing grandly through the full arv of his life, passing into death, which was violet light.” Basically what I’m inferring here is that Billy never actually travels through time. He actually is just coping with the terrible terrible life that he is living in which he can’t seem to die. Billy actually