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War Is Not Fair In Love Of War Analysis

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All is Not Fair in Love of War The novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut questions how war is perceived by mankind. Vonnegut in his first chapter describes the process of him deciding to use his experience of the Dresden Firebombing in World War II to be the main point of his dark satire. World War Two is one of many bloody conflicts and is certainly not going to be the last. It is ironic that there are so many regulations to the chaotic phenomenon of war because it is trying to give humanity to the destruction of human life. War is a time where we can justify the taking of another person’s everything. Vonnegut displays that humanity forgets the true nature of war by glorifying it as heroic, romanticising the thrill of battle, and …show more content…

Many grow up playing war or watching shows displaying how easy war is for the protagonist giving the impression that war is a game. What Billy Pilgrim the main character sees in Dresden is gruesome and ruins the thrill of war. The character Pilgrim describes that “There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn 't smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like mustard gas and roses”(pg.94). Pilgrim’s description is spine chilling because people are turned into meaningless heaps of their former humanity and must be disposed off like rocks in a mine. The soldiers who are on the ground or in the air at Dresden are forever scarred by the stench of burned flesh. Vonnegut constantly uses the phrase “mustard gas and roses” to describe the smell of war. The roses are the romantic views of war and the mustard gas is the deadly side. He repeats this phrase in order to describe how most war atrocities have the same smell of the soldiers’ hopes for war, but over time the stench of death will be all that is left after a day or two. Each soldier sees that their fight is the most important fight, but really in the eyes of time war is redundant. Vonnegut crushes the idea that every soldier 's’ actions will last the course of time by using the phrase “So it goes”(pgs.36,58,61). The phrase is used almost one hundred times in order to give the impression that most of war does not contribute anything new or helpful to humanity. Soldiers grow up with dreams that they will go on marvellous adventures or slay the wicked in order to be remembered, yet this is true for some not all. The Glory and romance of war are searched out by many, but many will be forgotten or die

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616 Words | 3 Pages

Due to Billy and the narrators’ accounts you see the effects of war not only on the soldiers, but also on bystanders. Such as the girls in the bath house in Dresden who were most likely killed from the bombing. I think Vonnegut is showing how much pain war can cause. The predestination versus free will theme pops up most during Billy’s accounts of his times with the Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians see life as all moments are going on at once and will continue on a loop.

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War is a very different creature when looked at from the standpoint of a soldier. Often this isn’t realized by soldiers entering battle. Paul Bäumer and Lt. Hans von Witzland were among these soldiers who had traveled to war only to find it wasn’t what propaganda and the Führer had made it out to be. In this state of disarray the laws of war were lost and replaced with savagery. In order to survive soldiers had to put away these ideas of fair fighting and fair treatment of the enemy.

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The book All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque portrayed war as a great hole of death and despair dug by a nation's higher power for the citizens to patriotically march into. All Quiet on the Western Front was written as a 'new-age' war story; The book focused on the horrors of war rather than the romantic veneer other previous writers had plastered on. The War obliterated the distinction between civilian and military targets. 'Armies were no longer targeting just their opponents, but the civilian towns that supply them too, killing innocent people. People still today, who are innocent civilians, are being killed for being on the wrong side.

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Finally war kill lots of people. One example is “I think we ought to bomb the daylights out of them, as long as we don’t hit any women or children or old people, don’t you?… ‘Or hospitals,’ he went on. ’And naturally no schools. Or churches.’ ‘We must also be careful about works of art,’...

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277 Words | 2 Pages

This theme of destruction will shape how Charley and the readers view war. In “Soldier’s Heart” by Gary Paulsen, the first words are “War is always, in all ways, appalling”. Lives are stopped in youth, worlds are ended”. This immediately describes the overall message of the novel, ‘war will never be triumphant’.

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War carries important morals that heighten the perspective of men and women on their nation, but it also entails many acts and experiences that leave lasting effects on their emotional and physical state. Throughout the following texts, Paul Baumer, the dead soldiers, and Kiowa’s comrades all sustain losses that compel them to persevere and fight harder. All Quiet on the Western Front, Poetry of the Lost Generation, and an excerpt from In the Field all connect to the recurring theme, horrors of war, that soldiers face everyday on the front line through the continuous battle. War involves gruesome battles, many of which lead to death, but these events forever affect the soldier’s mind and body. In All Quiet on the Western Front, men experience horrific sights, or horrors of war, through the depiction of the terrain, death, and the

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War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead." (pg. 80). The effect of war on each soldier who fought in it was different and unique, and as a result, each soldier's experience with war has a different effect.

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1745 Words | 7 Pages

Kurt Vonnegut enlisted in the United States Army at the time of World War II. He was captured as a prisoner of war where he received much of his literary inspiration for Slaughterhouse-Five. The anti war theme throughout the book is touched on and also rebutted when Vonnegut states, “there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers” (Vonnegut 4). Vonnegut knows he is writing an anti war book but also is aware that wars cannot altogether be halted he is only trying to relay the horrors of war. The number of innocent victims killed by the bombing is alarming and Vonnegut keeping with his anti war theme made it a point to center his novel around the Dresden bombing which increased knowledge of what the historical city Dresden once was.

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1406 Words | 6 Pages

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is the tale of a gawky World War II veteran/soldier, Billy Pilgrim. His wartime experiences and their effects lead him to the ultimate conclusion that war is unexplainable. To portray this effectively, Vonnegut presents the story in two dimensions: historical and science-fiction. The irrationality of war is emphasised in each dimension by contrast in its comic and tragic elements. The historical seriousness of the battle of the bulge and bombing of Dresden are contrasted by many ironies and dark humour; the fantastical, science-fiction-type place of Tralfamadore is, in truth, an outlet for Vonnegut to show his incredibly serious fatalistic views.

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1424 Words | 6 Pages

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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726 Words | 3 Pages

So, the message Kurt Vonnegut is showing the reader, is that a society should not glorify war. Thus saying that the killing of innocent civilians is more important than, going to war and not gaining anything. To conclude, Kurt vonnegut uses the theme of war in Slaughterhouse five to show how war has been glorified by the society in which Billy lived in. The glorification of war then led into the bloodshed of many innocent live.

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427 Words | 2 Pages

She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all” (Vonnegut, 102). After the war, he was not seeing life as something he was interested in pursuing. Living through any type of violence can change a character for the worst. Billy Pilgrim has witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, which was worse than Hiroshima. Vonnegut utilizes this experience of Billy’s to prove how such an act of violence can alter a person’s

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446 Words | 2 Pages

War is often romanticized as a necessary and heroic means of achieving justice and peace. However, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front exposes the brutal reality of war and its devastating consequences. Through the experiences of the protagonist, Paul Baumer, Remarque vividly illustrates how war destroys individuals physically and mentally, leaving behind shattered souls and lost cultures. Firstly, war causes physical destruction that not only kills soldiers but also damages the environment and infrastructure. Baumer and his comrades witness the horrors of modern warfare, including the use of chemical weapons and the trenches' squalor and disease.

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1033 Words | 5 Pages

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