Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Slaughterhouse-Five
(Characters)
- Billy Pilgrim: Main protagonist who struggles to cope with the terrors of war
- Edgar Derby: Fellow soldier who gets shot for stealing a teacup
- Valencia: Billy's wife who happens to be overweight
- Roland Weary: Fellow soldier who helps Billy survive while stranded behind enemy lines
- Robert Pilgrim: Billy's son whom he knows almost nothing about
Setting & Plot
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
- Takes place (for the most part) in Nazi Germany and the fictional town of Ilium, New York
- Billy has become "unstuck in time", allowing him to jump around to different moments in his life
- Witnesses the bombing of Dresden firsthand as a POW
- Becomes the lone survivor of a plane crash, suffering a major brain injury
- Hallucinates that he's abducted by Tralfamadorians
- Jumps around in time to escape the horrors of war that continue to haunt him
Literary Aspects
- Born in Indianapolis, Indiana on November 11, 1922
- Studied at Cornell University from 1940-1942
- The destructiveness of war
- The illusion of free will
- The importance of sight
- Well known for his satirical writing style and black comedy
- "So it goes"
- The narrator as a character
- Used war as a recurring theme in his works, having served in WWII
Post-Modernism
(Literature)
Kurt Vonnegut
(Continued)
- The bird that says "Poo-tee-weet?"
- The colors blue and ivory
- Witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war
- Struggled with depression, attempting to take his own life in 1984
- Died on April 11, 2007 in New York
Review
- His most famous works include Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions
- A late 20th century movement in the arts, architecture and criticism
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut is able to tell the story of a mentally traumatized WWII veteran while he subtly criticizes the mindlessness of warfare. He uses Billy's experiences as a look into how destructive wars can be, yet he continues to express Billy's life in a way that shatters the barriers between reality and fantasy.
- Became popular after WWII
- Strayed away from many literary conventions
- Embraced new writing styles like fragmentation, paradox, and an unreliable narrator
Slaughterhouse-Five
(Concerns)
- Focuses on the madness of war
- Wanted to avoid glamourizing the brutality of war
- Vonnegut is appalled by the firebombing of Dresden, having seen those 135,000 people die firsthand
- The novel's alternate name, the Children's Crusade, suggests that war is fought by young and ignorant innocents
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