4. SUBJECT: This book is written by a German veteran of World War I, who describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the frontlines.…
Slaughterhouse-five is about a man named Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim was born in 1922 and grew up in New York. He does reasonably well in school. While attending college to become an optometrist he is drafted in to the army. He trains to be a Chaplain Assistant. He is taken Prisoner in the battle of Bulge in Belgium. Right before his capture Pilgrim experiences his first flashback were he sees his entire life flashes before him. The Germans put him into a boxcar to Germany. Once he arrives he experiences a breakdown and get a shot of morphine and experiences another flashback. The POW are transported to Dresden to work manual labor. There is a slaughterhouse that is located in Dresden which become important later in the book. The US bombs Dresden and ended up killing 130,000 people. Pilgrim and some other POW survived this…
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut can be described as a novel that is interesting, creative, and well-written. Kurt Vonnegut writes this novel with a satiric voice but also expresses many other emotions as well. The first chapter is very unique because of the way Vonnegut tells the story of how he came about writing this novel and introduces his wartime friend Bernhard O’Hare. Although it seems like it might not belong at all, this chapter gives an introduction that might be needed for a character like Billy Pilgrim. Many times you can see how important Vonnegut is in the story and how important the story is for him.…
Summarize-Within this chapter, the author, Kurt Vonnegut, introduces the novel by assuring readers that everything in this book is pretty much true, especially the parts about the war. He begins his explanation of his experiences beginning with him and his wartime friend, Bernard V. O’Hare, returning to Dresden in 1967 with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. While being driven in a taxi to the slaughterhouse where Kurt and Bernard had been locked up as prisoners of war, the two men became friends with their taxi driver, Gerhard Muller. Gerhard stated to Vonnegut and O’Hare that he had been a prisoner to the Americans for a period of time. The three of them then had a discussion about communism. Around Christmastime, Gerhard sent…
Vonnegut’s life had a tremendous impact on the plot of Slaughterhouse-Five. The first few sentence in the book are “ All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true, One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. I’ve changed all the names” (Vonnegut 1). Theses first sentences inform the reader right away…
The setting of the story changes as the book goes on but for the most part the story takes place in Boston. The story first takes place in the Lapham household in the early 1770’s. The setting soon becomes the Lyte’s mansion, the courthouse, and various shops in Boston for a while. Finally the setting stays in one place for most of the book when Johnny moves into the Boston Observer shop. Some of the major themes are war transforms boys into men, war, pride, and forgiveness. Since the setting is Boston, where the British soldier…
to one of the worst air attacks in the history of man. By the end of the…
In the novel Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim experiences time differently from any other person. Instead of experiencing time in a linear fashion, Billy jumps randomly throughout all of the events in his life. It is this random experience of time that allows Vonnegut to enforce the themes of senseless violence and the illusion of choice.…
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…
In the novel Slaughterhouse- Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the story of Billy Pilgrim is used to explore numerous themes regarding life and war. Vonnegut’s appalling war experiences in Dresden guided him to write on the horrors and tragedies of war. All through the progression of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader is conveyed through the life events of Billy Pilgrim, a character who survives the Dresden firebombing and countless other tragedies. Oddly, Billy discovers ease in the concept that free will is an illusory belief, and that nothing can be done about any of the surrounding misfortunes that happen during his lifetime, or throughout any lifetime. He conveys his opinions and validates them with a claim of alien abduction, and therefore…
Slaughterhouse-Five is fictional and not written with many shocking, colorful descriptions of atrocities, which occurred during WWII as Elie Wiesel 's Night. The science fiction parts of the book are over emphasized. One does not get a truthful account of the happenings of WWII from Slaughterhouse-Five. The Tralfamadorian 's science fiction aspects of the novel dull the anti-war theme. Their beliefs coerce Billy to forget about the war; the Tralfamadorians tell Billy, "one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones" (Vonnegut 117). They also tell Billy, "we spend eternity looking at pleasant moments;" they cannot do anything about the awful times, so they ignore them (Vonnegut 117). The climax of the novel is the fire bombing of Dresden; the reader is aware of this from the start, it is stated in the first chapter. The description of the bombing it is short; one could almost miss it. Billy does not travel back to the event nor does he re-live it, like he does many other less important events. The book 's climax is supposed to be the fire bombing of Dresden;…
This story is about a nineteen year old soldier named Paul Baumer followed by his friends while at war and it shows how it effects each and every one of them physically and mentally.“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”(Remarque 13) World War I was a tragic war with more than 9 million soldiers dead, and roughly 21 million were injured in the end. Germany and France both sent millions of men between the ages 15-50 into the war. Throughout the book and the movie you can see and understand all of the tragic deaths that occurred on both sides of this war. Not only were there millions of deaths by the fighting but also many deaths by other things such as, soldier dying from lack of food, lack of reinforcements, rats running through the trenches, and lastly deadly gases in the air. Any soldier that actually did survive was considered “lucky” to Paul Baumer. “We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life.…
Along with when this movie took place, “where” was also a very important element. The…
to WWII, in Dresden, Germany. In 1945, the American air force bombed and annihilated the entire town. Thomas Schell and the grandmother both experienced the U.S. attacks on Dresden. While both lost the entirety of their families, these two characters offer…
The story takes place in the middle of a hot summer in an American town called Franconia. According to the narrator this town is an awfully drab place to live, and a place, where “no one’s imagination is working overtime”. This is the uninspiring suburb, where the narrator lives with her brother, Jason and her mother. Along with Jason’s best friend, Eugene, the narrator and Jason study at the Franconia High School.…