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Slaughter House Five

In: English and Literature

Submitted By moonj59
Words 1584
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Research Paper: Slaughter-House Five

In the semi autobiographical novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut uses the character Billy Pilgrim to depict the effects of war, death, and post traumatic stress disorder.
Kurt Vonnegut felt the need to create the character of Billy Pilgrim to express his own feelings of trauma because of the difficulty to address them on a personal level. Like Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim was captured by the Germans, and witnessed the fire bombing in Dresden on February 13, 1945, which is known to be the most detrimental airstrike in military history, killing an estimated 135,000 people. “He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked...A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what is was like outside, then he would come back down and whisper to the other guards. There was fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame are everything organic, everything that would burn.” (Vonnegut 177) This quote from the book illustrates how the image of Dresden is instilled in Vonnegut's brain, from when he witnessed it, and how he can't let go of his lingering memories of Dresden. Billy Pilgrim is greatly disturbed by the obliteration he witnessed in Germany. These events signify Vonnegut’s painful past and he comes to terms with his pain through the writing of Slaughter-House Five. Freese explains,“The eventual result of Vonnegut's attempt to come to terms with his Dresden experience was his “anti-war book” Slaughter-House Five, of which was a therapeutic thing.”(Freese 74) Vonnegut used his writing to self heal the pain he suffered from his personal experiences in war, and shared them through Billy Pilgrim.
Kurt Vonnegut is a character in his novel, Slaughter-House

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