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Summary Of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

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The novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut has been a controversial novel for quite some time. Vonnegut starts out the novel by telling the reader he is going to write a book about the bombing of Dresden. He then asks his friend from the war, O’ Hare, to help him retain his memories, but while they recap information, O’ Hare’s wife is flustered and angered that someone wants to write a book about something so horrible. She does not want her kids seeing war as a good thing coming from the book. While writing his book, Vonnegut struggles to recall his past, and PTSD played a factor, even though the disease was not discovered yet during the 60’s. In his anti-war novel, he discusses the bombing and says Dresden looked like the moon. At times …show more content…

The anti-war novel can be seen as glamorizing the subject of war. When you think of the perspective of war today, it may seem to glamorize young kids and adults. They play video games like Call of Duty and Modern Warfare and think it is right to kill others. People may see Slaughterhouse Five as a novel that glamorizes war, but at the end of the day what the novel does is tell a story about history. Why should students be banned from learning about their country? On the other hand, when they are in school the curriculum does not allow students to read about drugs, liquor, or life. (p.25 Veix). High schoolers read love stories or fiction and are not taught about bad things Americans have done in past time. When Vonnegut released his novel it allowed the bombing to go public and created sensitivity and significance to the ongoing Americans in Vietnam. (p. 9 Rigney). Americans should be educated about the bombing so they can learn more about America’s history, even if it is an event they are not proud of. Teachers can teach the book by having students report on the tragedy of the novel and therefore recover from all the information they are taking in as a group. (p. 29 Veix). Americans today watch movies or play video games about war, but are unaware of the bombing of Dresden during World War

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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

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As Billy Pilgrim is walking out onto the city streets after the destruction of Dresden. In the book Slaughterhouse Five though, the description of the destruction of dresden was when billy pilgrim was watching a movie about the bombing but in rewind, “The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes” (Vonnegut, 74). With the little image that we get from Kurt Vonnegut’s book we can already see how dangerous and how much destruction that we see with the battle that was in dresden, but I can not imagine how much blood that was poured into the streets from this fire and bomb shells everywhere.

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