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Slaughterhouse Five Literary Analysis

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Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” analyzes the events Vonnegut himself experienced as a soldier in WWII. This story is told through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a skittish soldier who is often made fun of in his position as a Chaplain’s assistant. He is rarely involved and often finds himself unprepared in times of battle, yet as an inexperienced soldier, he finds himself straight in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. However unlikely of a hero Billy appears to be, he possesses an uncontrollable ability where he randomly becomes ‘unstuck’ in time, and travels to various points within his own life, both past and future. This creates a story that has several settings and timeframes, some which involve Billy's war moments, others involve personal events like his marriage, days at work, or even his time spent on the alien planet of Tralfamadore. This manipulation of time and setting throughout ‘“Slaughterhouse-Five” allows Vonnegut to convey to the reader his viewpoints on global-conflicts. War is a conflict that has no sense or purpose, it is merely chaos and destruction with no resolution. …show more content…

Billy seems to be telling the story from many different timeframes and different points of view. This chaos of a structure in this story is a direct reflection of how the author truly feels about war. The order of events in this book makes the reader feel confused or wonder ‘What is GOING on?!”, the events seem to have little correlation, or mean nothing to the rest of the story. This is exactly what Vonnegut is trying to say about war, it doesn’t make sense! “Slaughterhouse-Five” reflects this to the fullest, boasting an extreme entropy nothing short of a

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Nevertheless, there are many ways of coping with the trauma; however, some of them are not always beneficial, such as Billy’s methods of creating the memory thathe is abducted by Tralfamadorians. “Tralfamadore is a fantasy, a desperate attempt to rationalize chaos, but one must sympathize with Billy’s need to create Tralfamadore” (Merrill and Scholl 6). Billy needs to create Tralfamadore to mask the trauma, but as he invites other accommodations to his fantasy planet, such as Montana Wildhack, the masking of his trauma turns into coping of his pain. There is no past, present or future tense in Slaughterhouse-Five and therefore it is impossible to decipher the time in Billy’s life that he is speaking from. This reflects on the war trauma that haunts Billy until his death because it does not where you are in your life; trauma, pain and anguish will always

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