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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

Themes:

  • 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

Motifs

  • "So it goes"
  • The narrator as a character
  • Used war as a recurring theme in his works, having served in WWII

Post-Modernism

(Literature)

Symbols:

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

Image by goodtextures: http://fav.me/d2he3r8

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