Slaughterhouse Chapter 5 Literary Analysis

In Slaughterhouse 5, the often use of literary elements show how much of a insane and twisted novel it really is. For example, Vonnegut would use satire when talking about war. Satire uses irony and humor to ridicule social conversations. Primarily, this allows the reader to show how destructive of a war is going on meanwhile laughing at some the aspects it contains. Around the beginning of the book, the narrator appears to overstate the problem by saying “Do you know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books? I say… Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?” (Chapter 1, Pg. 4). This is a form of emphasis that the narrator uses to tell the reader how there would always be war, the same way that there would

Basically Vonnegut was constantly described the setting and the tone of the story. In chapter 4, when Billy answered a phone call, the narrator described the other person’s breath as mustard gas and rose. Also, when Billy was walking through New York, Billy’s feet were described as ivory and blue while his cold hands were told to be as an ivory claw. There would be constant repetition of phrases like these and that can show how every section of the story is not separated in any way from each other. Towards the climax of the novel there a very ironical situation where the narrator states, “He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed” (Chapter 8, Page 226). This is a great example of the irony in Slaughterhouse 5 because of how much of a joke Billy is as a soldier since he had such a lack of training and experience but he just happened to be one of the few people to survive. Throughout all of the use of sarcasm and irony anyone can see at the end how Billy’s life has been put the together. This contributes to the meaning of the book because of how well the narrator was able to describe Billy’s past experiences with irony and multiple other literary