What is Slaughterhouse-Five about?
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) is a science fiction-infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut about the World War II experiences of Billy Pilgrim. It follows his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant, to postwar and early years - occasionally traveling through time itself.
What is the ISBN number for Slaughterhouse Five?
Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade. New York, New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. pp. 73. ISBN 978-0-385-31208-0. ^ a b Vonnegut, Kurt (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade.
Why did Vonnegut write Slaughterhouse Five?
For Vonnegut, the form for Slaughterhouse-Five grew out of events arising from his World War II experiences, particularly the horrors of the months-long Dresden air raids. Because he views the Dresden bombing as senseless, everything Vonnegut writes describing the bombing has to feel senseless as well.
What are the allusions in Slaughterhouse Five?
Slaughterhouse-Five makes numerous cultural, historical, geographical, and philosophical allusions. It tells of the bombing of Dresden in World War II, and refers to the Battle of the Bulge, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights protests in American cities during the 1960s.
What is the purpose of Slaughterhouse-Five?
Slaughterhouse-Five makes numerous cultural, historical, geographical, and philosophical allusions. It tells of the bombing of Dresden in World War II, and refers to the Battle of the Bulge, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights protests in American cities during the 1960s.
What is the moral or message of Slaughterhouse-Five?
By focusing on the suffering of individual human beings, such as the German refugee girls killed in the Dresden firebombing, Vonnegut shifts attention about the morality of war away from big questions of national politics and toward smaller, less justifiable instances of personal pain.
What is Vonnegut trying to say in Slaughterhouse-Five?
The most significant theme in Slaughterhouse-Five concerns the dichotomy of predestination and free will. Over and over again, Vonnegut proclaims that there is no such thing as free will. Humankind is the slave of predestination, meaning that all human actions are prescribed before they occur.
Why does Vonnegut write Slaughterhouse-Five?
Billy Pilgrim's unhinged time—shifting, a mechanism for dealing with the unfathomable aggression and mass destruction he witnesses, is Vonnegut's solution to the problem of telling an untellable tale. Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five as a response to war.
What is the lesson of Slaughterhouse-Five?
By focusing on the suffering of individual human beings, such as the German refugee girls killed in the Dresden firebombing, Vonnegut shifts attention about the morality of war away from big questions of national politics and toward smaller, less justifiable instances of personal pain.
What does the slaughterhouse symbolize in Slaughterhouse-Five?
The title itself, Slaughterhouse-Five, is symbolism because in a slaughterhouse, it is usually animals that are murdered, but in this case, it is the humans who are being killed due to the bombing; and Dresden, the larger "slaughterhouse" of Germany, becomes the novel's great and silent tragedy.
Why is Slaughterhouse-Five Controversial?
One of the best-known attempts to ban Slaughterhouse-Five happened in 1982, when Island Trees Union Free Public School District removed a selection of books, including Slaughterhouse-Five, from junior high and high school libraries for being “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.” The ...
What does the bird symbolize in Slaughterhouse-Five?
The Bird Who Says “Poo-tee-weet?” The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say about war. Birdsong rings out alone in the silence after a massacre, and “Poo-tee-weet?” seems about as appropriate a thing to say as any, since no words can really describe the horror of the Dresden firebombing.
What is Kurt Vonnegut's message?
In “Harrison Bergeron,” Vonnegut suggests that total equality is not an ideal worth striving for, as many people believe, but a mistaken goal that is dangerous in both execution and outcome. To achieve physical and mental equality among all Americans, the government in Vonnegut's story tortures its citizens.
How is Slaughterhouse-Five a satire?
Satire in Slaughterhouse Five is shown in a title that points to the immaturity of the characters of the novel; comedic, senselessly violent situations; a bizarre alien race that teaches Billy free will is an illusion, and an ironic death for the protagonist who has escaped imminent death his entire life.
Who is the intended audience for Slaughterhouse-Five?
Many in the audience were obviously college students, but people were also there who could have been their parents, and it was not exclusively the young who had brought along paperback copies of one or another of Vonnegut's novels.
Who is the narrator of Slaughterhouse Five?
Narrator: Recurring as a minor character, the narrator seems anonymous while also clearly identifying himself as Kurt Vonnegut, when he says, "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." As noted above, as an American soldier during World War II, Vonnegut was captured by Germans at the Battle of the Bulge and transported to Dresden. He and fellow prisoners-of-war survived the bombing while being held in a deep cellar of Schlachthof Fünf ("Slaughterhouse-Five"). The narrator begins the story by describing his connection to the firebombing of Dresden and his reasons for writing Slaughterhouse-Five.
Why does Lazzaro kill Billy?
Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life". At this exact time, Billy becomes "un-un-unstuck in time" and has flashbacks from his former and future life. Billy and the other prisoners are transported into Germany.
Is Slaughterhouse Five a metafictional book?
The book has been classified as a postmodern, meta-fictional novel. The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is written in the style of an author's preface about how he came to write the novel. The Narrator introduces the novel's genesis by telling of his connection to the Dresden bombing, and why he is recording it.
Is there a Christian in Slaughterhouse Five?
Christian philosophy is present in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five but it is not a very well-regarded. When God and Christianity is brought up in the work, it is mentioned in a bitter or disregarding tone. One only has to look at how the soldiers react to the mention of it. Though Billy Pilgrim had adopted some part of Christianity, he did not ascribe to all of them. JC Justus summarizes it the best when he mentions that, "'Tralfamadorian determinism and passivity' that Pilgrim later adopts as well as Christian fatalism wherein God himself has ordained the atrocities of war...". Following Justus's argument, Pilgrim was a character that had been through war and traveled through time. Having experienced all of these horrors in his lifetime, Pilgrim ended up adopting the Christian ideal that God had everything planned and he had given his approval for the war to happen.
When was Slaughterhouse Five published?
I first read “ Slaughterhouse-Five ” in 1972, three years after it was published and three years before I published my own first novel. I was twenty-five years old. 1972 was the year of inching slowly toward the Paris Peace Accords, which were supposed to end the war in Vietnam, though the final, ignominious American withdrawal—the helicopters airlifting people from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon—would not take place until three years later, at which point, by way of a small footnote to history, I had become a published writer.
Who inspired Douglas Adams' book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
In this way, Kilgore Trout inspired Douglas Adams’s celebrated book “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ,” in which, you may recall, the earth was demolished by Vogons to make room for an interstellar bypass, and the sole surviving man, Arthur Dent, went in search of answers.
What is the story of the Kilgore Trout?
In Vonnegut’s novel “ Breakfast of Champions ,” we learn about another Kilgore Trout story, “Now It Can Be Told,” written in the form of a letter from the Creator of the Universe addressed to the reader of the story. The Creator explains that the whole of life itself has been a long experiment.
Is slaughterhouse five a realist book?
The truth is that “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a great realist novel. Its first sentence is “All this happened, more or less.”. In that nonfictional first chapter, Vonnegut tells us how hard the book was to write, how hard it was for him to deal with war. He tells us that his characters were real people, though he has changed all the names.
Is slaughterhouse five humane?
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” is humane enough to allow, at the end of the horror that is its subject, for the possibility of hope. Photograph by Santi Visalli / Getty. I mention Vietnam because, although “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a book about the Second World War, Vietnam is also a presence in its pages, ...
Is Catch-22 funny?
It hadn’t occurred to me until I read them that antiwar novels could be funny as well as serious. “Catch-22” is crazy funny, slapstick funny. It sees war as insane and the desire to escape combat as the only sane position. Its tone of voice is deadpan farce. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is different. There is much comedy in it, as there was in everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote, but it does not see war as farcical. It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye. Vonnegut is a sad-faced comedian. If Heller was Charlie Chaplin, then Vonnegut was Buster Keaton. His predominant tone of voice is melancholy, the tone of voice of a man who has been present for a great horror and lived to tell the tale. The two books do, however, have this in common: they are both portraits of a world that has lost its mind, in which children are sent out to do men’s work and die.
How old was Kurt Vonnegut when he was in Slaughterhouse Five?
And Kurt Vonnegut, at the age of 46 , with Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (those twin magnificences) under his belt, was projected into a state of creative culmination/exhaustion by Slaughterhouse-Five.
Does Slaughterhouse Five get old?
It never gets old, is the point. It never wanes in energy. This book is in no way the blossom of a flower. Slaughterhouse-Five is more in the nature of a superpower that the mutant author had to teach himself to master—and then could use, at full strength, only once. The self-training took decades.
What is the moral of slaughterhouse five?
There are really two answers to the question of what is the moral or message to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. One is obvious and one is less so. The obvious message is that war is incredibly destructive and inhumane. The other is that there is no message or moral, because in a universe in which such awful things happen, there is no chance of any overarching meaning.
When was Slaughterhouse Five published?
Kurt Vonnegut 's World War II novel Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, is his most widely read, discussed, and taught book.
What does Vonnegut say about the machinery of war?
Third, Vonnegut says that the machinery of war (science and technology) reduce the individual to the role of victim, such is the widespread death and destruction it breeds.
What does Vonnegut say about war?
First, Vonnegut says that war is inevitable . Stopping a war, or writing an anti-war novel, is like stopping a glacier: it is an exercise in futility. As a result, humans lose their free will and become victims in the machinery of war, casualties of political ends.
Where is the slaughterhouse in Slaughterhouse Five?
After being captured by the Germans, the novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, and his fellow prisoners of war are taken to live in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, an old and beautiful city in eastern Germany. Since Dresden was a civilian city with little military significance in World War II, it was believed to be safe from bombing. However, on February 13, 1945, the Allies firebombed Dresden in an air attack that is believed to have killed about 130,000 civilians. This puts the Dresden bombing on the same scale of destruction as the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima later that same year. Billy and the other American prisoners survived the bombing by taking shelter in “an echoing meat locker which was hollowed in living rock under the slaughterhouse.” Kurt Vonnegut, the book’s author, survived the real-life bombing in the same way. Thus, Slaughterhouse-Five was first and foremost a real place.
What is the slaughterhouse in Vonnegut?
One of the great instances of situational irony in the novel is how Billy survives the bombing in a slaughterhouse, a place where animals are killed, while those outside of the slaughterhouse are, in fact, the ones slaughtered. In this way, the slaughterhouse becomes a shelter while the city of Dresden becomes a slaughterhouse. Many of the victims, whom Billy (and Vonnegut) were later forced to dig up, died untouched in their clothing from suffocation. This image recalls, with an ironic twist, the “dressed carcasses” of animals still stored in the meat locker where Billy and the POWs took shelter. In technical terms, a dressed carcass is the body of a slaughtered animal after the hide, head, tail, extremities, and internal organs have been removed. In the case of the civilians killed in the Dresden bombing, however, the phrase becomes sickeningly literal. The civilians who suffocated to death in large groups in basements reminiscent of meat lockers are “dressed carcasses” because they are the bodies of still-dressed dead humans.
What happened to the victims of the Dresden massacre?
In this way, the slaughterhouse becomes a shelter while the city of Dresden becomes a slaughterhouse. Many of the victims, whom Billy (and Vonnegut) were later forced to dig up, died untouched in their clothing from suffocation.
Why are civilians dressed as carcasses?
In the case of the civilians killed in the Dresden bombing, however, the phrase becomes sickeningly literal. The civilians who suffocated to death in large groups in basements reminiscent of meat lockers are “dressed carcasses” because they are the bodies of still-dressed dead humans.
How did Billy and the other American prisoners survive the bombing?
Billy and the other American prisoners survived the bombing by taking shelter in “an echoing meat locker which was hollowed in living rock under the slaughterhouse.”. Kurt Vonnegut, the book’s author, survived the real-life bombing in the same way. Thus, Slaughterhouse-Five was first and foremost a real place.
Is the whole planet Earth a slaughterhouse?
The metaphor can be stretched even farther: the whole planet Earth is also a metaphorical slaughterhouse. As Vonnegut says in Chapter 1, “Even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”.
Is Dresden a metaphorical slaughterhouse?
It is not only the city of Dresden that becomes a metaphorical slaughterhouse—war itself is a kind of slaughterhouse, a place where humans are killed in large numbers like livestock, often by machines, and without a trace of compassion. The metaphor can be stretched even farther: the whole planet Earth is also a metaphorical slaughterhouse.
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Overview
Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is a 1969 semi-autobiographic science fiction-infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. It follows the life and experiences of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years, to his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during World War II, to the post-war years, with Billy occasionally traveling through time. The text centers …
Plot
The story is told in a non-linear order by an unreliable narrator (he begins the novel by telling the reader, "All of this happened, more or less"). Events become clear through flashbacks and descriptions of his time travel experiences. In the first chapter, the narrator describes his writing of the book, his experiences as a University of Chicago anthropology student and a Chicago City News Bureau correspondent, his research on the Children's Crusade and the history of Dresden, …
Characters
• Narrator: Recurring as a minor character, the narrator seems anonymous while also clearly identifying himself as Kurt Vonnegut, when he says, "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." As noted above, as an American soldier during World War II, Vonnegut was captured by Germans at the Battle of the Bulge and transported to Dresden. He and fellow prisoners-of-war survived the bombing while being held in a deep cellar of Schlachthof Fünf ("Sl…
Style
In keeping with Vonnegut's signature style, the novel's syntax and sentence structure are simple, and irony, sentimentality, black humor, and didacticism are prevalent throughout the work. Like much of his oeuvre, Slaughterhouse-Five is broken into small pieces, and in this case, into brief experiences, each focused on a specific point in time. Vonnegut has noted that his books "are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips...and each chip is a joke." Vonn…
Themes
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut attempts to come to terms with war through the narrator's eyes, Billy Pilgrim. An example within the novel, showing Kurt Vonnegut's aim to accept his past war experiences, occurs in chapter one, when he states that "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 kille…
Symbols
Vonnegut was in the city of Dresden when it was bombed; he came home traumatized and unable to properly communicate the horror of what happened there. Slaughterhouse-Five is the product of the twenty years of work it took for him to communicate it in a way that satisfied him. William Allen notices this when he says, "Precisely because the story was so hard to tell, and because Vonnegut was willing to take two decades necessary to tell it – to speak the unspeakable – Slau…
Allusions and references
As in other novels by Vonnegut, certain characters cross over from other stories, making cameo appearances and connecting the discrete novels to a greater opus. Fictional novelist Kilgore Trout, often an important character in other Vonnegut novels, is a social commentator and a friend to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. In one case, he is the only non-optometrist at a party; therefore, he is the odd man out. He ridicules everything the Ideal American Family holds true, s…
Reception
The reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five have been largely positive since the March 31, 1969 review in The New York Times newspaper that stated: "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner." It was Vonnegut's first novel to become a bestseller, staying on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks and peaking at No. 4. In 1970, Slaughterhouse-Five was nominated for best-novel Nebula and Hugo Awards. It lost both to The Left Hand of Darkness by Urs…