Slaughterhouse Five Essay

In the novel “SlaughterHouse five” written by Kurt Vonnegut and published in 1969, Kurt Vonnegut talks about the inevitability of death and how it makes you think back on important things from your life. “Slaughterhouse Five” is a fictional anti-war novel that follows the main character ‘Billy Pilgrim’. In the novel Billy becomes “unstuck in time” which allows him to live at all times of his life in a non-linear story line. In the novel death is a relevant issue that Billy Pilgrim struggles to understand which is represented by the "time traveling" that forces him to reflect on all of the experiences he has lived through. Therefore, the inevitability of death in this novel forces readers to think about universal experiences that display the

In the first line of the text we see Kurt Vonnegut use the metaphoric phrase, “Billy pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” And the passage “Billy has gone to sleep, a senile widower, and awakened on his wedding day. He walked through a door in 1955 and came out another one in 1941” The effect of this nonlinear narrative is to show how Billy Pilgrim’s experience of death is skewed randomly across the novel. These truly display how unnatural Billy's life which allows him to move in between different times of his life; Billy waking up on his wedding and then exiting the room to enter the war clearly reflects the global issue of death by showing the reader how the inevitability of death is sporadic and unpredictable which leaves the readers questioning the morality of one another and how to confront death. Kurt Vonnegut's use of the sentence “His father died in a hunting accident during the war. So it goes.” Billy’s father dying helps readers understand how Billy feels about death and how he handles it. The use of the phrase “So it goes” is what Kurt Vonnegut uses after every death because it symbolizes Billy’s attitude to death and it suggests a sense of stoicism in the face of