What Is The Moral Of Slaughterhouse Five By Kurt Vonnegut

For centuries and centuries, the creativity of the human mind has been the only source of power that has never stopped flowing. From cave paintings to online articles, humankind has never lost the basic desire to create art. However, as long as art has been created, there has also been an opposing side ready to firmly challenge the work. Author Kurt Vonnegut is an artist who spent the majority of his career battling limitations on his creative expression, especially in his most popular and most notorious work: Slaughterhouse-Five. The story is partially based on Vonnegut's own life, telling the story of World War II soldier Billy Pilgrim, holding nothing back from the truth of war and the drastic effects that battle can have on a human being.
Many of the books deemed acceptable in high school curriculums feature lead characters that are seemingly perfect. While this seems great in theory, adolescence is one of the most imperfect times in a human's life. Teenagers need to feel like they are not alone during their high school years, and need characters in books that they can relate to. In William Dudley's 2012 book Media Violence, he quotes one teen blogger as saying "'Good literature rips open all the private parts of us—the parts people like you have deemed too dark, inappropriate, grotesque or abnormal...'" (Dudley 1). The statement was directed at those attempting to ban pieces of literature similar to Slaughterhouse-Five. Books that truly make a lasting impact on readers are those that they can see themselves in. Only so much can be learned from a story without any real stakes. There is no human that is perfect, and as all readers are presumably human, that means that no reader is perfect. A completely non-relatable character will not only cause teenage readers to lose interest, but can also lead to high school students feeling even more alone than they already do in the whirl of blinding color that is high school. Also, Dudley states in his book that "teens do not need to be shielded from real life in YA fiction." (Dudley 1). It is entirely impossible to make it through four years of high school without being exposed ad nauseam to cruel people and bad decisions. Therefore, preventing them from reading literature such as Slaughterhouse-Five will not help shelter them, it will only limit their academic experience and could kill their self confidence. There are plenty of evil humans on this planet, and evil characters in books can help students to prepare for encounters with dastardly people and teach them how to deal with unpleasant