Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: An Analysis

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five serves to be a metaphorically rich memoir hidden behind the fictional story of Billy Pilgrim who is “stuck in time”. This unhinging of time contributes to the ways Billy copes with the unimaginable mass destruction and belligerence he witnesses in Dresden during World War II. Vonnegut’s use of satire and obvious anti-war sentiment furnishes the hostility towards the dismal Vietnam War, causing audiences to question the militarism of the United States at this time and for many to agree with his pacifist views. The ultimate unjust bombing of Dresden in 1945 is repeated throughout history with the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo and Hiroshima and later, the attacks on civilians in Vietnam.

Those who can handle the brutal, relentless subject of death should definitely give this book a read to experience the ruthless bombing of Dresden, a little known occurrence, and to experience World War Two as told accurately and

PTSD has been associated with long-term exposure to warfare or other threats to a person’s life , to which Billy have had encounters with throughout the duration of the war. Evidence of Billy's PTSD include the fact that he ascribed the faces of the guards in Dresden, in reaction to the bombing, as “a silent film of a barbershop quartet” (pg. 178), likely due to the indescribable nature of the violence. Subsequently in Billy’s life, as he travels with his father-in-law to Montreal via a chartered plane, the singing of a barbershop quartet named ‘The Febs’ triggers a series of memories of the war for Billy, including the hanging of a “Pole” (in reference to a Polish person) “in public, three days after (he) got to Dresden” (pg.

On the other hand, Billy gets away with keeping a diamond. It is worth considering the fact that Vonnegut finished Slaughterhouse-Five more than twenty years after the war was over so we should not forget the fact that Vonnegut always writes from the survivor’s point of view, many years away from the fury of the war and he has the accommodation to laugh, to satirize, ironies with war and all the laughter has to be a step away from madness of the war. As a result of making the death of Edgar Derby as the climax of the novel, Vonnegut doesn’t minimize the destruction of Dresden but he succeeded to reveal the injustices of the war by showing the fate of only one individual in the war. Vonnegut shifts the attention of readers through irony from the destruction of whole city and the death of ten thousands to the execution of an American soldier Edgar Derby for picking up a teapot out of ruins: Derby’s crime is so minuscule in comparison with the larger crime of destroying an undefended city that if death is the proper punishment for his actions, what punishment should be given to those responsible for burning Dresden? rightly asks Tom Hearron

(Vonnegut 2). Having forgotten one of the most important parts of his life, it hints at how pointless war is and how something as big as Dresden can be forgotten as time goes on. Billy Pilgrim

While Billy is writing his paper, the temperature in the rumpus room plummets. Vonnegut conveys how pathetic Billy is, through irony, by stating, “A mouse had eaten through the insulation of a wire leading to the thermostat” (35). The mouse is an ironic subject for initiating the extreme change in Billy’s condition/comfort. The temperature dropped to 50 degrees because a small and insignificant animal chewed on a wire, and Billy did absolutely nothing about the mouse or even the temperature. Again, the seeming indifference Billy has about his life is portrayed through the fact that even a creature of its diminutive size affected his welfare and he did not care.

Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse- five because he needed a response to war. The whole novel shows of a man struggling to keep himself together in a horrible time. The structure of the book is scattered due to the fact of his time travel and alien abductions throughout the novel. Vonnegut wrote the book to help make sense of the experiences he went through, which were extremely traumatic considering he was a prisoner of war. He had severe PTSD from his experiences and needed to transport himself from the horrors in his head.

SlaughterHouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has a strong, recurring theme of how disastrous war is and the effects it has on a person. In this novel's case, Billy Pilgrim and even the narrator are showing obvious signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Although this topic is quite serious in some situations, Billy Pilgrim doesn't seem to know he has this disorder and his thoughts and actions are comical at times. The idea of traveling to a distant planet named Tralfamadore is very unlikely and its most reasonable to say Billy made it up. Towards the ending of the novel, Billy releases the information about his trip to the “book store” and his knowledge of the books by Kilgore Trout.

Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden when the destruction of Dresden was going on. He was lucky enough to have made it out. It gave him the opportunity to write Slaughterhouse Five, the story that revolves around experiences from being in Dresden. His writing represented more than just an escape, it was as if a portal to see his past. Although it was his way out to tell the truths of war and the inhumanity that walks among us, he made it his own.

The narrator explores much of the protagonist’s life. Although, he emphasizes Pilgrim’s war experiences and the negative impacts they imposed on him that followed him to his death. The conflict begins when Billy and the other soldiers are taken as prisoners of war and forced to live in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. During this period, the city is burned down by an unseen firebomb attack. Billy escapes this momentous occasion by hiding out in a locker, scared.

Black humor is a mode of artistic expression in literature, drama and film in which usually serious or tragic subject such as war, death, atrocity are treated in darkly comic fashion in order to express the cruelty or absurdity of the contemporary world. Humor can also be a natural outcome of fear and it is not surprising if some dire events in Vonnegut’s narratives incite laughter rather than tears. Then, Vonnegut believes in laugh less jokes or what some critics prefer to call „black humor‟. “True enough,” Vonnegut admits, “there are such things as laugh less jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.” Vonnegut chose dark or black humor to describe a reality that goes beyond human imagination.

Slaughterhouse Five -Kurt Vonnegut Postmodernism, the subject of several debates is the totality of philosophical, political, social, cultural and artistic phenomena of the post-World War II period. It is considered to be a radical break with classical modernism, but can also be seen as the continuation and development of modernist ideas. The term ‘postmodernism’, ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmodernity’ are often used interchangeably to refer to social and cultural changes after World war II, but these changes are not always synchronized in different areas. That is the reason why the terms ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmodernity’ are often used for general developments, the term ‘postmodernism’ being reserved for developments in culture and arts. (Selden,

As a narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut writes articulately,

Knowing that 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War immediately brought me back to the days which I delved into the book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut for a course at Peking University, China when I was one of the two chosen students from Macao Polytechnic Institute to study there as an exchange student. It was not long when I was enlightened and became certain of my specialisation in literature－Psychoanalysis. In my preparation of a Master’s degree, I have studied widely around the topic Literature and Psychoanalysis. I hope to examine closely the complexity of the human psyche and its literary presentations and constructions.

Slaughterhouse-Five examines the similarities with Vonnegut and Norman Mailer making himself a character in The Armies of the Night, Vonnegut used his own real-life experience in surviving the Dresden bombing to establish authorial legitimacy. Like Mailer, also Vonnegut discusses the reasons why he was writing this book and the difficulties he encounter remembering war experiences. When Vonnegut appears as