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Theme Of Diction In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

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Kurt Vonnegut’s style of diction is abstract and neutral throughout the novel of “Slaughterhouse Five”. The following is an example of this: “I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best friend, Allison Mitchell. They had never been off Cape Cod before. When we saw a river, we had to stop so they could stand by it and think about it for a while. They had never seen water in that long and narrow, unsalted form before. The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines. We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware” (Vonnegut 11-12). The previously-mentioned reasoning is inherently evident when used in usually-picturesque
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388 Words | 2 Pages

This passage from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, takes place on the planet of Tralfamadore, where the tralfamadorian is talking about the concept of free will, which is apparently, unique to earthlings. The passage goes on to further say that out of hundreds of planets, only on earth does the idea of free will exist. This passage argues that faith is futile, due to our lack of control of situations that occur around us. The tralfamadorian cannot understand the concept of free will. Free will, is the ability to make one’s own choices, however Slaughterhouse Five suggests throughout the novel, that free will, is not as free thinking as what was once thought.

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59 Words | 1 Pages

the idea of equality was taken to the extreme. Satire is also used to exaggerate how awful equality is to persuade readers to believe that total equality will violate human rights. Kurt Vonnegut also uses symbols such as handicaps which make everyone equal and Harrison Bergeron to display the lack of freedom present in a world of total equality.

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436 Words | 2 Pages

Vonnegut use of existentialist detachment can be used to describe the tone of Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel is fragmented into miniscule sections. The majorities of these sections is rather thrilling and contain much action, thus the narrator does not give himself ample room to become emotional regarding the events he is concerning. Therefore, it is difficult to understand what type of emotional meaning the narrator is endeavoring to communicate. The narrator detaches himself from events, then, does not get emotional, consequently the novel is spoken in a straightforward means.

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673 Words | 3 Pages

Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut intertwines reality and fiction to provide the reader with an anti-war book in a more abstract form. To achieve this abstraction, Kurt Vonnegut utilizes descriptive images, character archetypes, and various themes within the novel. By doing so, he created a unique form of literature that causes the reader to separate reality from falsehood in both their world, and in the world within Vonnegut’s mind. Vonnegut focuses a lot on the characters and their actions in “Slaughterhouse Five.”

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575 Words | 3 Pages

In the book slaughterhouse five by Kurt vonnegut, there are many deaths that contribute to the book’s meaning as a whole, it represents how death is something that takes place in everyone's lives. Vonnegut writes “so it goes” after every death or near death experience that a character in the book encounters to show how inevitable death is. Vonnegut explains, “The plane crashed on top of sugarbush mountain, in vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes” (25).

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557 Words | 3 Pages

Displacement can refer to a variety of situations. It can be the shifting of one usually unsuitable object in place of another. It can be the fleeing of inhabitants due to a danger. It can even be the transfer of strong emotions from their original subject to another. Regardless of definition, however, displacement revolves around a form of manipulation to the system often resulting in varying degrees of change.

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1162 Words | 5 Pages

When someone believes that it’s possible to time travel and get abducted by aliens, they clearly have a mental disorder. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, though it is a fictitious novel, it contains serious and real content. It has its sadistic humor, but it is truly a war story where the outcomes are not good. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is said to be unstuck in time and is abducted by aliens. Though, there is a lot against the reality of that.

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1077 Words | 5 Pages

The no-space trip: a mirror to our world Literature serves as a mirror to our world, when looking into it closely, it reflects even the most banal aspects of ourselves and the society we live in. Kurt Vonnegut 's Slaughterhouse Five serves as a mean of social criticism. For instance, the creation of Kilgore Trout and the different plots of his books criticize several aspects of society by the use of science fiction such as faith, economy and oil dependency. In chapter nine, Billy Pilgrim stops at a store which has several Trout books. As he reads them, the narrator introduces the resumed plot of each one.

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2045 Words | 9 Pages

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal”1 is a statement that in the mouth of the American writer should sound at least victorious. However, Kurt Vonnegut in the opening line of his dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron creates a highly ironical declaration, which he later ridicules by the following story. The author who gained his fame by writing the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, describes the world supposedly equal and free, but entirely bound by the laws that command the lives of people. That describes also fairly well the second short story 2 B R 0 2 B, which title refers to the famous phrase “to be or not to be”2 from William Shakespeare 's Hamlet, as mentioned in the text, “the trick telephone number that people who didn 't

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441 Words | 2 Pages

Themes in various amounts of stories can range from love to death. While themes portray the central idea of the story; they figure out the theme of the story you can discover many secrets the author describes throughout the story. In Slaughterhouse Five, the main character as described as “stuck in time” which would make you wonder why. Certainly Vonnegut distributes a variety of literary elements to capture the central theme of the story using setting, conflict, and symbolism to show that time is the theme.

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1070 Words | 5 Pages

Vonnegut’s use of diction is given through George who expresses his concerns about removing his handicaps and implies his dislike for the times where the handicaps weren’t in affect. And without them, he believes that everyone would be constantly competing against one another, however, in actuality everyone won’t be forced to repress their talents and strengths. Furthermore, Vonnegut uses mostly denotative and cacophonous

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641 Words | 3 Pages

Much like money, time is a human construct. Human beings created the concept of time to organize the events of their lives in a continuous, chronological order. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five, depicts a different interpretation of time and the organization of events in Billy Pilgrim’s life. Billy Pilgrim’s life is broken up into brief events, and Vonnegut writes the events out of chronological sequence, which adds a unique flair to an already distinctive work of literature. In addition, Vonnegut includes the Trafalmadore alien’s perception of time to further solidify the theme in his work.

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1189 Words | 5 Pages

How did Kurt Vonnegut use postmodern approaches to create an antiwar antinovel in Slaughterhouse 5? When Slaughterhouse 5 was published, it could have been considered as an outsider in the literary world. In the midst of the Vietnam war, it was preaching antiwar notions, and in a time where straightforward linear storylines dominated the media, Slaughterhouse 5 presented a challenging nonlinear plot. The nonlinearity in plots would later on become a staple of postmodern literature but Kurt Vonnegut missed the peak of the postmodern era publishing the novel in 1969; a decade before the peak in the 1980's.

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727 Words | 3 Pages

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, the use of an analogy, diction, and irony contribute to the anti-war portrait of Billy Pilgrim by illuminating that society’s futile and cataclysmic war efforts cause more damage than results, making war utterly useless in the grand scheme of life. One occurrence of the anti-war message Vonnegut creates in his novel is expressed when Vonnegut writes, regarding Billy Pilgrim, “He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” (23). This analogy to a stage play continues throughout the novel and has a strong anti-war message within it. Vonnegut constantly ties plays to Billy to demonstrate that war is romanticized

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1076 Words | 5 Pages

Storytelling has been the epitome of human expression for thousands of years. Along with musicians and artists, talented storytellers use their work to share ideas with others, often in an effort to evoke emotion or to persuade people to think similarly. Every element in a story is carefully crafted by the author in order to communicate a desired message to his or her audience. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut incorporates irony into the story to express his belief that fighting wars is illogical.

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