There are two inevitable aspects of life: war and death. Kurt Vonnegut addresses this idea in his novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” in an effort to reconcile with the war in Dresden. Not only does he want to reconcile with it, but he, also, wants to teach everyone that warfare and death is an element of life. In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Vonnegut uses imagery, repetition, and satire to develop the theme of war and death.
Kurt Vonnegut demonstrates the literary device, imagery, to combat the theme of war and death. The imagery employed to connect Billy Pilgrim’s personal encounter of the war with Kurt Vonnegut’s, the narrator, memories of the war. When Billy Pilgrim uncovers the destruction of Dresden, he illustrates the odor of the cadavers as “roses and mustard gas” (Vonnegut 274). In essence, Vonnegut creates an image of nothing less than a repulsive aroma to describe the repercussion of war. Additionally, Vonnegut describes characters “nestled like spoons” numerous times in the science-fiction novel: in chapter three when all the people were sleeping in the
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For example, Billy Pilgrim thought the “climax of the book [would] be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby” to expose the irony used in the novel (Vonnegut 6). Essentially, Vonnegut uses this phrase to portray sarcasm in the fact that Edgar Derby’s death might as well be the exciting part of the science fiction novel since nothing is satisfying about war. Additionally, Billy Pilgrim is explaining to Sam that “[all] there is to say about a massacre [is] things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’” (Vonnegut 24). This portrays that the war in Dresden must not have been successful because at the end of it everyone is speechless except the birds. These references back up the theme of war and death through the use of satire by illustrating that the only way to make combat and casualty seem pleasurable is through sarcasm and