Slaughterhouse Five Critique

Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Dirty Dance With Death was written by Kurt Vonnegut and originally published in March of 1969. It’s a dark humor science fiction story that exactly fits Vonnegut's writing style: funny, astounding and makes you question the human race as a whole. The book follows a the lifespan Billy Pilgrim of Ilium, New York. He grew up to be an optometrist,served his country at war, got married, had children and aged to an old man. But his life was not ordinary at all. The books focuses on his experiences serving in World War Two, and his unintentional and unexpected time travel through his own life. Billy Pilgrim’s war experiences are told in an unusual way in comparison to the other books and movies being made about war
at the time that Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five. Those movies and books/ other forms of media available at the time depicted war as a hollywood movie. There were good guys and bad guys. The good guys, the heroic protagonists will be brave and macho war-loving men. They will kill all the bad guys and everything will be better for having the war. But Vonnegut didn't touch this kind of narrative with a fifty foot pole. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim is docile, submissive, meek and gentle man. He is beat by the war, imprisoned and subject to horrid living conditions, and finally escapes home, although not in a very linear order. This difference between the depictions of war show that even though there may be some hints of pro war influences in Slaughterhouse Five , it is, by a long shot a high advocate of anti war across the world.
The evidence that Slaughterhouse Five is a pro war peice of literature is very weak, and with that, very minimal and difficult to find. Only small things stand out as pro war. One tiny example is when Vonnegut goes to visit and drink with his old war buddy: I took a couple of belts of the booze I'd brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were coming back, but neither one of us could remember anything good(worthy to write a book about). O'Hare remembered one guy who got into a lot of wine in Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take him home in a wheelbarrow. It wasn't much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers who had looted a clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of clocks. They were happy and drunk. They were smoking huge cigarettes they had rolled in newspaper.
Like many unpleasant experiences, the ability to be so far past them that one may look back and laugh at was one vary troubling is always a happy time for the certain individual.
That small ability to look back and reminisce is usually a really good time, witch in Slaughterhouse Five proves to be one of the only, if any, good things to come out of the war. Making the small and weak argument that Slaughterhouse Five is a book promoting war in any sort of positive way. The many different pieces of anti war claims found throughout the pages of Slaughterhouse Five connect together to make one hell of a convincing argument for it being an anti war book. One example is how veteran of the war, and all wars are now scarred forever with horrific images of war. This quote shows now how a very unpleasant scene of death that Vonnegut comes across in his job as a journalist doesn't even affect him, for her has memories of stuff so much worse than a man crushed to death between two elevator doors: When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her own information, what the squashed guy had looked Eke when he was squashed. I told her. 'Did it bother you?' she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers
Candy 'Heck no, Nancy,' I said. 'I've seen lots worse than that in the war.' (Vonnegut 9-10)
All the veterans that were out in the front line, seeing some of the worst stuff the see on the Earth now live with that every day of their life, which has to be extremely scary, to have to always remember the most traumatic events of one's life is a very terrifying aspect of war. Even if the war is over and done, all the soldiers still are fighting with it every day forward. Another anti war point from Slaughterhouse Five is that the only veteran who still thought about the war in a positive light didn't really fight, they had paper pushing jobs: We had a lot of scrawny veterans and their scrawny wives for friends. The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought. (Vonnegut 9)
The ones who had really fought, that had seen what it was really like, hated the war and for good reason. The veterans who know what the war really was know that it's terrible and who would know better than them. War is despicable and disgusting, and having a previous role in it would make them hate it even more which makes sense, because war deserves the hate it gets, plus much more. Slaughterhouse Five is a good example of an anti war book that has enough variation of story to keep the reader from war story overload. It gives an in-depth description of an American soldier fighting in World War Two, taken into a German Prisoner of War camp. The terrible living conditions of the human beings fighting for their county. Parts of this book that glorify war simply don't exist in any significant way. Slaughterhouse Five shows how the war hurt and broke the spirits of so many humans. How it turned some into monsters and turned the others into the monsters unwilling prey. War goes against all the good things that the human race have offered to the world,whilst war is one of the absolute worst. Slaughterhouse Five is an anti war book, and for good reason.