Kurt Vonnegut as an author has defied the normal norms of storytelling and has been very successful at it. The use of fragmentation in slaughterhouse five has been a weapon he has used to good effect. It starts of as being confusing and chaotic but as it goes on you come to terms with it understanding it better. There are some things that remain to be answered and only Kurt Vonnegut can answer them. He is a person who has been affected by war in a big way. The trauma of war shows itself in a full-blown proportion in Slaughterhouse Five.
The text on the whole is told in a period where, the central character Billy pilgrim comes unstuck in time and keeps on going to moments of his past and instances in future (or at least he knows about them). Everything he writes is based on his own experiences and how they left him. He includes a character from his home state of Indiana in every novel in order to put himself into the novels (Lundquist 4). Slaughterhouse Five takes place almost entirely within Hitler’s Germany.
It is perhaps Vonnegut’s most autobiographical work to date, the action occurring in and around Slaughterhouse Five, the very hellhole in which he toiled for his captors. The former is no doubt less autobiographical, but the main character certainly has many things in common with his creator: an American artist within Nazi Germany, doing what he felt was necessary to stay alive and to further his work. The author himself tells us he had to write this book. His subtitle “A Duty-Dance with Death” also takes on a personal aspect. Vonnegut had to reconcile himself with the war, the death, and its impact on him.
Tools and Context (war) Through the use of philosophies and ideas, characters, and entire settings, Kurt Vonnegut makes his experiences as a soldier and a prisoner in the Germany of World War II an important part of his writing, as it is no doubt an important part of his life. He is able to take the attitudes and feelings of himself and of the general population during and following the war, and to use them to spin fabulous yarns warning against the dangers of militarism and excessive scientific zeal, without detracting from his own story.
There is no doubt that World War II played a crucial role in the development of his writing, and that is proof that at least some good can be salvaged from Man’s mistakes. Again, when one choose to discuss Vonnegut’s literary tools and how he uses them in Slaughterhouse-Five, one must remember the complexities of this particular novel. Because this story is a blend of fiction and non-fiction, Vonnegut’s narration can be seen as both third person and first person.
Due to the fragmentation of time there is no past, present or future in Slaughterhouse-Five. This view of all time existing at once becomes a lesson that Billy learns from a group of aliens called Tralfamadorians. The literary tool of a flashback technically could not be used in this novel, although several references to the past are made. The truth of the matter is that no one knows where the plot begins, so when a jump to another time made, it is unknown as to whether it is a flashback of a flashforward.
The use of these flashbacks and flashforwards is to show one Billy’s mental instability; that is he travels to a happier time in life rather than face reality. Pilgrim copes with his war trauma through time travels to the planet Tralfamadore, whose inhabitants have the ability to see all of time – past, present, and future simultaneously. The bombing of Dresden, Germany is why it took Kurt Vonnegut so long to write this book. The human pain and suffering is still fresh in the mind of the author twenty-three years later.
One can only imagine the intense emotional scarring that one would suffer after exiting an underground shelter with a dozen other men to find a city destroyed and its people dead, corpses laying all around. The main character of this novel mirrors the author in many ways, but the striking similarity is their inability to deal with the events of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945. Themes The theme that Kurt Vonnegut wanted everyone who read his book to know just exactly how bad war is.
He wanted people to know a man was killed for stealing a teapot. He wanted people to know that a city of 135,000 can be completely obliterated in the name of war. He wanted people to know the mental scars that war can carry. All that he was trying to say is that it hurt; it hurt him inside and out; war hurt Vonnegut enough to write this novel. He wants people to know the atrocities of war, and that it should never happen again. (1) Asked for his thoughts on the book, Vonnegut responded by claiming that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the bombing.
The raid,” Vonnegut said, “didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited – not two or five or ten. Just one. ” That one person was Vonnegut who, according to his own reckoning, has received over the years about five dollars for every corpse. (6) By fragmenting Billy’s life like this, Vonnegut is able to bring the events that comprise his life closer together. One minute Billy is marching through a forest and the next he is waiting at a public pool for his father to teach him how to swim.
This constant fragmentation of Billy’s life serves, ironically, to unify Billy’s character for the reader. By going back and forth in Billy’s life the reader is able to see a whole picture of what Billy is actually like instead of just one fragment of his personality. (2) Another obvious theme of the book is that death is inevitable and that no matter who dies, life still goes on. The phrase “So it goes” recurs one hundred and six times: it appears everytime anybody dies in the novel, and sustains the circular quality of the book.
It enables the book, and thus Vonnegut’s narration, to go on. There is a continuing cycle of death and renewal throughout Billy’s story. “So it goes”, found over one hundred times, plays an important role in the continuation of the novel. Each time a death occurs “so it goes” helps us to accept the death, that there is nothing we can do about it, and move onto renewal and reentry into the living. This expression ties many aspects of the story together, helping the entire work to keep dying and renewing itself again.
Later in the novel Pilgrim is accused of having echolaia, a “mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say” (192; ch. The audience could also accuse the author of the same disease in a metaphorical sense. This is just one of the incidents connecting the two narrations and perspectives in the novel: Vonnegut’s and Pilgrim’s. In Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut also uses a minor character to show the craziness of war. Edgar Derby had survived both the Battle of the Bulge and the fire bombing of Dresden.
He later makes the terrible mistake of stealing a teapot from the ruins of the tattered city. For this unspeakable crime, he is tried and shot. This is yet another example of how Vonnegut uses irony, with black humor to show the futility of life. Ironically his optometry enables others to see when he can’t see for himself. It also parallels his need to “comfort so many people with the truth about time” (28; ch. 2). Like the catcher in the rye, Billy wants to save people by helping them see. (3)
