The prisoners of the concentration camps are constantly tortured and neglected by the German officers who run the camps. The cruelty of the German officers at the concentration camps change Elie’s personality throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Elie is deeply religious and spends most of his time studying Judaism. However, by the end of the novel, Elie believes that God has been unjust to him and all the other Jews, and has lost most of his faith. The cruelty of the German officers also changed the other Jews as well.
Hell on earth has been redefined for many. Some may perceive it as a typical annoyance, however others may see it as literal torture in scenarios such as the Holocaust. In the Buchenwald concentration camp that Elie Wiesel attended, he encountered the first American soldiers. To them, perceiving just a glimpse of how the Jews were living was enough to make them bewildered and unable to comprehend what was going on. To them, it was unknown as to what to do or what to say.
Lilia Bieker M. Segovia AP English IV - 7th 1 April 2018 Vonnegut’s Perspective in Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut’s work, Slaughterhouse five, is a story of Billy Pilgrim, for the most part a non-heroic character, who goes through a violent and ever changing experience when drafted into the army as an American soldier for World War II. Experiencing the harsh bombings of Dresden, Germany, Billy survives and is stuck living a life in which he “travels” back and forth in time, visiting his past, present, and future in burstful, out of sequence moments. With the help of psychoanalytic criticism, Vonnegut guides his own point of view through Billy Pilgrim, to express his strong opinion of deromanticizing war. Vonnegut expresses that men are stripped of their innocence and humanity by the nature of war. By using Billy Pilgrim as a mirror character not only can he project his anti-war ideas, but address his own experience of being in the war himself.
While Billy was a captive in Luxembourg, a German war correspondent takes photos of him for war propaganda because he looks so incompetent and he wants to exhibit how poorly equipped and pathetic the American army is: “He took pictures of Billy’s and Roland Weary’s feet.[... ]They threw Billy into shrubbery[...]they menaced him with their machine pistols, as
In almost everything he does he is the odd man out. Billy seems like the weird person who just always seems out of place and like he doesn't belong. 1969 was the year that this book was published. PTSD was discovered in 1980, so therefore in the book they couldn't define Billy’s condition. As even in reality they didn't know what it was.
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.
He gathered other fallen angel and wanted to revolt. He said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven (254-55).” However, I disagree mind change his attitude toward Hell and Heaven, because he pointed out how painful he was in the Hell and how he admired Heaven which shows his mind doesn’t make him feel the Heaven like hell and think Hell like heaven. The actual meaning of this sentence is that your mind is a very important part of your body. What you think depends what you feel. It means, although real situation may be very tough, your mind can change your opinion of what you feel about the real situation.
For example, in "Dulce et Decorum Est", Wilfred Owen discussed the horror of war and, through that, its effect on the survivors. First of all, he showed us the images of soldiers marching through the battlefield. The scene was somber, with the man looking as if they had gone through hell and back. They were tired, some not even able to stay awake. Yet, they continued onward, toward an unknown
Although death became norm within the camp, those that are the most significant to Elie are the deaths of those he knows. Because of this, the death of his father had become notably more devastating for him than the numbness he feels for the deaths of the other prisoners within the camp. The suffering and passing of the only family member he had left impacted him greatly then, causing Wiesel to describe the situation in vivid details in his memoir. The sacrifices he was willing to make for his father affects the readers gravely; from the helplessness Elie feels when his father was dying to how he had to suppress his sorrow for the sake of his own survival. A foreboding tone was set while his father weakened, before it turned into a somber and dark tone for his death.
When World War two broke out in Europe, Vonnegut served in the Battle of the Bulge where he was taken as a prisoner of war. He survived the Allied bombing in Dresden through staying in the underground meat locker making vitamin supplies, and afterwards his captors forced them to dig up the thousands of civilian bodies and burn them in mass graves. When the bombing held few headlines because of its non-strategic location, this outraged Vonnegut, impacting him to write Slaughterhouse Five which fused his documentation of the gruesome war and inhumanity caused to human to human, as well as his own emotion and experiences during the war. After the war, he married Jane Marie