...Slaughterhouse Five Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim is a disoriented, fatalistic, and ill-trained American soldier. He does not like wars and he is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse (although there are animal carcasses hanging in the underground shelter) in Dresden. Their building is known as "Slaughterhouse number 5". The POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar; because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm during the Bombing of Dresden in World War II. Billy has come "unstuck in time" and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively, following a He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the veracity of their theories. As Billy travels—or believes he travels—forward and backward in time, he relives occasions of his life, real and fantasy. He spends time on Tralfamadore, in Dresden, in the War, walking in deep snow before his German capture, in his mundane post-war married life in the U.S.A. of the 1950s and early 1960s, and...
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...Insanity is generally described as being mentally deranged. They are unable to make conscious decisions on their own therefore they are placed in a psychological state that prevents normal behavior and perception. Slaughterhouse-Five explores the life of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim in a series of arbitrary events. As his life progresses, his insanity begins to progress and reveal more. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim who is ‘unstuck in time’ and creates Tralfamadore for his positive reinforcement, as someone insane due to the trauma and causes of his war-time experiences. After Billy remarkably returns from World War 2, he is unable to let go of the war experiences he suffered in, which were very traumatizing, He is institutionalized with post-traumatic stress disorder and this was the source to him feeling very isolated and lost. While Billy was being treated in the hospital: “Everybody else thought he looked fine and was acting fine. Now he was in the hospital. The doctors agreed: He was going crazy”... “They didn’t think it had anything to do with the war” (Vonnegut, 100) Everyone but the doctors believed that he was a fine patient. Billy lives through horrible conditions during the war for example when people started dying on the box car and many soldiers in the war often had hallucinations, diagnosed with many problems because of all the traumatic images seen during that time, and must have lost any type of motivation for life and...
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...Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is the story of an American soldier named Billy Pilgrim who is taken prisoner by the Germans in World War II. Suffering from some sort of post-traumatic stress, Billy believes that he can travel in time and that he was abducted and kept captive by aliens for several months. Consequentially, the story is told in nonlinear bits and fragments. Billy Pilgrim is a scrawny, disoriented, fatalistic optometrist who does not like war. The story of his life as a soldier begins just before he and an antitank gunner are captured, when he has his first ‘time traveling’ experience and witnesses the entirety of his life from beginning to end. Billy is transported to a POW camp in Germany by boxcar. Upon arrival, the new...
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...Vonnegut’s vision for Slaughterhouse-Five was not to glorify war, but to make it clear that World War II was not a heroic act. As discussed, he highlights the obvious downsides of war. For example, soldiers did not have basic supplies like boots resulting in frostbite, they experienced bombings, lootings, constant hunger, and the overall destruction of war that clearly left an impact on Vonnegut and in turn his protagonist whom he places his personal experiences upon. The American soldiers portrayed in the novel are mostly weak and run down while the British soldiers are portrayed as fit, tough, “real” soldiers. This is important to note because the characters of British soldiers are POWs that were captured and the very beginning of the war in Dunkirk so they were never exposed to the true destruction and death that the American POWs were. The British did not understand why the Americans were so weak and even looked down on them for their lack of hygiene, but in reality the British were just extremely lucky to have escaped the war before the horror truly began. This anti-war message expressed by Vonnegut in his novel was received controversially in many parts of the world, specifically throughout the United States. Slaughterhouse-Five was frequently censored in high schools throughout America. For example, in Oakland County, Michigan the book was banned. The circuit judge who made the decision had nothing good to say about the book at all. He said Slaughterhouse-Five was “depraved, immoral...
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...The story Slaughterhouse Five is about a boy named Billy Pilgrim who grows up in Ilium with a father that is a barber who gets killed during a hunting incident. This happens before Billy joins an infantry regiment in Luxembourg. He gets moved to Battle of Belgium where he is immediately a prisoner under the Germans. With that he is treated to a dinner by other prisoners and then takes that dose of morphine having him travel in time to Dresden days of intense labor. While in Dresden one night the Allies power came and attacked leaving the city in destruction and Billy barely alive leaving him terminate his part in the war after the Russians take over. Billy enrolls in Optometry during the evening where he meets his wife Valencia.Billy confesses to messing his daughters wedding because he was captured by Tralfamadorians. Tralfamadorians have a different idea of life and death than humans do....
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...Throughout the past couple decades, society has bared witness to a rise in romanticized and glorified war stories depicted in film and literature. However, this image of war as an honorable and worthwhile endeavor has always been present in human history up until the 1960’s. Written in 1969, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five is an absurd satirical novel inspired by the author’s experiences in World War II that follows protagonist Billy Pilgrim through all phases of his life as he has become unstuck in time. On the other hand, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb directed by Stanley Kubrick is a political dark humor film released around the same time, only five years prior, that satirizes the madness and terrifying...
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...In Vonnegut’s anti-war book, Slaughterhouse-Five, he has a character named Billy Pilgrim, who is a drafted American soldier during World War II. He goes through different parts of his life by time traveling and encounters with aliens along the way. The story revolves around the bombing of Dresden and how Billy interprets life as the way he sees it. From end to end in the book, Vonnegut uses plentiful of rhetorical techniques such as: metaphors, syntax, and diction to emphasize to the readers that the British are comically more “realistic” for war than the American POWs— in all actuality the Americans are mostly depicted the way it is in reality. The way Vonnegut intertwines metaphors, syntax, and diction to reiterate that the American POWs are not as well “prepared”, although the British are. Vonnegut uses syntax as he writes, “The Englishmen had hoarded these so cunningly that now, as the war was ending, they had three tons of sugar, one ton of coffee, eleven hundred pounds of chocolate, seven hundred pounds of tobacco…” He contrasts the British explicitly with the detailed list that they are rich of food and resources because the British have to share with the broke down Americans....
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...In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim’s most traumatic experiences all came from his childhood. Even though Billy endured the devastating traumas of war, his traumatizing experience still came from his childhood, caused by his father. All that was noted about Billy’s father was that he was a barber, he died in an hunting accident while Billy was in the army. The the most predominant experience Billy had with his father was when he decided to teach Billy how to swim. He did this by using the swim or sink method, “His father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim” (Vonnegut 43). This traumatized Billy as it nearly killed him. Billy fell unconscious and almost drowned before he was saved. He describes...
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...That is to say, one must read in between the lines to gather the full understanding of Vonnegut’s expressions, or rather inexpression of violence of war. Vonnegut’s writing style directly correlates to the notions that violence cannot be accurately represented. Ultimately, this suggests that Slaughterhouse Five’s larger theme at work is that the violence of war is a trauma that is utterly unrepresentable. In majority of Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim’s explanations are done in a matter-of-fact way. Whether this be about time travel, his family’s tragedies, or about the...
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...In “Slaughterhouse Five”, Vonnegut writes a whole novel based on World War Two and the bombing of Dresden. Billy Pilgrim, the main character has been drafted into the army during World War two, where he trains to be a chaplain’s assistant, which causes him to be disliked by many of his peers. Billy is thrown into the Battle of the Bulge where he is immediately taken prisoner by the Germans, put into a slaughterhouse prison and assigned to work for the city of Dresden. Due to the war Billy was diagnosed with PTSD and has become unstuck in time. He states that he has seen his birth and death many times, hence pays random visits to events in between. Billy doesn’t see much freedom in his life, which is why he has no shame in believing that there is no such thing as free will. According to Vonnegut there are no heroes or villains, if there were to be any we would be judging people by their actions and intentions. There is one character that comes close to being a hero, Edgar Derby who stands up to an American Nazi but in this novel he isn’t known for being a “hero”. Billy believes that aliens known as the Tralfamadorians have kidnapped him and have taken him to their planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians teach Billy their perspective of life and that if someone dies they...
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...The Judge of Wars and American Society --Black Humor in the Slaughterhouse Five American society was unstable at 1960s. Korean War and Vietnam War catalyze anti-war emotion among the American people. Black humor was normally appeared in the both literature works and comic works during that period. Black means oppression, sadness, helpless and death. Black humor is a way of using ironical comedy to show tragedy. Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were the most famous writers in American at the period of anti-war writing. Slaughterhouse Five and Catch 22 were the representative work of black humor back then. In the Slaughterhouse Five, through the using of dark humor in the language and the characters, Kurt Vonnegut suggests the meaningless, indifferent and ruthless of the wars and American Society. In the Slaughterhouse Five, there are senses of embittered humor with the Tralfamadorian phrase “So it goes” and “blue and ivory”. These two phrases appear in the novel more than a hundred times. Through the using of repeating phrases after each time when death happens, Vonnegut built their meaning with each incremental refrain. It may look upon as funny in an ironic way when one see “So it goes” at the first time. However, when one reads further in the novel, that phrase becomes irreverent and irritating. Also at the same time, Vonnegut compares the war scene which is “all the young people in bright elastic clothing and enormous boots and goggles, bombed out of their skulls with snow,...
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...Thus Far in Slaughterhouse Five, the readers were bombarded with many different pieces of new information. Billy Pilgrim was aboard with the creatures of Tralfamadore heading to their home. On the way, Billy asked to read a book to kill the time. Although they had many books on microfilm, they could not project them so he was stuck with one option, and the book was called Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann. They did not only have books in english, but they had books written in their form of writing. On page 88 it says, ““Only Tralfamadorian novels, which I’m afraid you couldn’t begin to understand,” said the speaker on the wall.” Even though Billy obviously couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, he tried to and he discovered that they are laid out so there were clumps of symbols separated by stars which were bits of messages so if you read them all, they would have...
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...BKurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a confusing but meaningful story whose nontraditional form explains how meaningful life is. Kurt Vonnegut takes readers back into WWII with Billy’s wild encounters. Billy thinks about how life is meaningless and it never ends, just repeats and repeats. Kurt Vonnegut uses a lot of black humor and a lot of irony throughout this novel. Corresponding of this, readers are able to realize the disgust of the war, but at the same time laugh at some of the absurd situations Billy goes through. Vonnegut beautifully shows that life is simultaneously worthwhile and meaningless. All people react differently when it comes to calamities; some people mourn, some avoid the tragedy all together. In Slaughterhouse-five,...
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...December 20th 2013 The Rise of Unwavering Band of Light Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was born on November 11th 1922 and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is known as American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. His funny, somewhat slang and imaginative writing style of fiction has been well-known especially among scholars, collage students and young people for more than 50 years. Through his works which usually involving dark humor, comical drawings, flying saucers and time travel, Vonnegut expresses social criticism about the suffering and atrocities human beings experienced in the 20th century—from the effects of war and atomic weaponry, to racism, social injustice, and environmental destruction. His remarkable novel Slaughterhouse-five (1969) is acknowledged as his masterpiece and has successfully catapulted his name to international fame. It recounts the story about the come-unstuck-in-time Dresden War ex-serviceman Billy Pilgrim who was abducted by extraterrestrial creature from Planet Tralfamadore. This novel is also a piece of Vonnegut’s memoir as an eyewitness when the tragedy happened. While in his seventh novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973) he stated at the preface “This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof—having ascended one slope” (4). The story revolves around a well-to-do Pontiac dealer Dwyne Hoover who was stepping into madness after reading a novel from an insecure yet talented science-fiction...
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...Derangement as a way to escape trauma, similarly, can be reflected in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. As a survivor of the bombing of Dresden in World War II, Billy Pilgrim has turned into a schizophrenic by imagining a trip to a non-existing planet called Tralfamadore, where he acquires the ability to come unstuck in time and gains a new philosophy of life. The fragmentation of the narrative pattern in Slaughterhouse-Five represents Billy’s inability to integrate the dreadful experience into his consciousness. Billy’s post-traumatic symptom reveals in his constant visit of past events, especially the tragic bombing scene. According to Farrell, trauma sufferers’ symptoms can go from the state of ‘paralysis’ to ‘frantic’ (Post-traumatic...
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