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Slaughterhouse-Five
In Chapter Five of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy has a very strange morphine dream in which he sees a garden with giraffes wandering around on gravel paths in it. In this dream, Billy...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
By focusing on images of destruction, brutality and the psychological derailment of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut presents a clear anti-war stance. His approach to conveying this message...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
In the first chapter, when discussing the difficulty that he had writing the anti-war novel, Vonnegut explains that "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." Since the bombing of...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Vonnegut has Billy react this way because the barbershop quartet reminds Billy of the German soldiers when they saw the destruction of their homeland after the bombing of Dresden. Billy, the...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, the Tralfamadorians are a race of aliens who can see in four dimensions and who uphold the philosophy that death is meaningless. The Tralfamadorians abduct...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Vonnegut states in the first chapter that he is attempting to write an anti-war novel. He promises Mary O'Hare, to whom the book is dedicated, that he will not have any John Wayne type characters...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Good question! If Reagan served as president from 1981 to 1989, and if Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 and takes place between the 1920s and 1976, with most of the action happening around...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
In true Kurt Vonnegut fashion, honor is the opposite what what he and others experienced during the Second World War. This belief is wonderfully displayed in a scene where Billy Pilgrim, back home...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
There are a few different aspects of the hog barn post-firestorm that show the fire must have been extremely intense. "It's [the hog barn's] walls still stood, but its windows and roof were gone,...
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1984
There are two themes that relate well to George Orwell's 1984 and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The first theme is the destructiveness of war on a society. In 1984, Oceania exists in a...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
To write a well-developed paragraph, you need to have some sort of central idea. So let’s take a look at Derby’s speech and come up with a couple of ideas, and then develop them. The main idea...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
The late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was a gifted author. He had also the misfortune of living through one of the single most destructive acts in the history of mankind, the Allied bombing of the historic...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Because of the perspective Billy Pilgrim gains from the Tralfamadorians, he understands that death is not something to fret about but just something that happens along the timeline of every...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut, as he reminds us several times during the novel, personally witnessed the firebombing of Dresden. That experience is central to his understanding of war, life and death, humanity,...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
The American POWs started off with eight guards in Dresden, a group of old men, young boys, and even a man with an artificial leg (149). On the evening of the firebombing, four of the guards go...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut’s tone as he relates a conversation he had years earlier, as a young reporter in Chicago, with one of the newspaper’s reporter-writers to whom he dictated his story over the...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
You're not going to understand a book like Slaughterhouse Five until you understand its context and the concept of absurdist literature. Slaughterhouse Five, to reiterate, is Vonnegut's attempt at...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut Jr, in Slaughterhouse Five, relates many stories that are essentially biographical, although the characters are fictional. Billy is the main character and, at the end of chapter one,...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
One of the many techniques that Vonnegut uses in this novel to explore the horror of war is inserting himself as a character into the novel through a framing device at the beginning, and then every...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
What Vonnegut actually does in this novel is to profoundly challenge the ideas that Americans had about themselves and about how they compare to other nations, particularly in relation to the war....
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut, in writing Slaughterhouse-Five, looked upon the task as a cathartic experience. The key to understanding this novel is in the preface, which is entirely autobiographical, and in...
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Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. had a menial career in writing by the time he finished and published what would become his most impactful novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. This was his opus and he told everyone who...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
From its subtitle, "The Children's Crusade", Vonnegut's novel clearly characterizes war as a terrible thing in general and certain aspects of conformity and patriotism as being terrible in...
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Kurt Vonnegut
It would be helpful to your argument if you could find some references in Kurt Vonnegut's novel to the German V2 rockets which were described as "Hitler's secret weapon." Here is an excerpt from...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
im just asking for the meaning of the gospel from outer space. and what Vonnegut is trying to say.
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Catch-22
Both of these texts are similar in the way that they paint a very bleak picture of war as something that is ultimately destructive and of no benefit whatsoever to humanity. This is highlighted just...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
It is helpful to think of genre categories as being somewhat flexible. A novel can be "literary", like Vonnegut's works, while also being science-fiction. Also, science-fiction works can and often...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
One of the themes of Vonnegut's novel relates to the idea of perspective and interpretation. Text is a natural medium for dealing with this concept. Some aspects of the novel that express this...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
There are two episodes in particular that relate to this question. The first depicts Billy's experience being thrown into a pool. His father tells him that he is going to teach Billy to swim by...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
This is a great question to consider. I would argue that this book does succeed as an anti-war book. Let us remember that throughout all of Billy's toing and froing, the main focus of the story is...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
In Chapter 4, both Billy Pilgrim and his guards are shown to coo at varioius stages and for different reasons. Firstly, Billy Pilgrim "gurgled and cooed" when he experiences a jump in time and goes...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
This is a particularly interesting quote, because it actually seems to contradict later understandings of time presented through the Tralfamadoreans and their curious way of perceiving past,...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
The differences between the two deaths on the ninth day are characterised by self-awareness. The forty-year-old hobo is described as being completely unaware, either consciously or unconsciously,...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
All of the prisoners clearly have spent some time together since their capture, and during that time they have come to associate Billy as somebody who is unable to sleep peacefully. When Billy...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Both conversations in this chapter present all forms of life as if they were bugs trapped in amber. This first is raised when Billy asks why his captors chose to abduct him and why he is now on a...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Edgar Derby is another American prisoner of war who is with Billy Pilgrim in the prison camp and who befriends Billy during their time together. From his very first introduction, the narrator draws...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
The links between the Germans and the Tralfamadoreans are highlighted in this chapter through reference to free will and the reasons why things happen. This is shown when an American prisoner is...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Billy Pilgrim, the most unlikely hero (or anti-hero) there ever was in a novel, is shown to be even more of an outcast and an oddity in this chapter through the clothing that is given to him at the...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Chapter 5 includes two flashbacks to when Billy was twelve and on holiday with his parents. On this holiday, he visits two natural wonders: the Grand Canyon and Carlsbad Caverns. Both experiences...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
As befitting the different way in which Tralfamadoreans view the world, the novels that they read likewise vary radically from human novels. This is of course brought into focus at the beginning of...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Tone is a highly important element in this novel. It is also, however, a rather complex element of the novel. Vonnegut employs a tone that can be described as wry, bitter, and even outraged. Yet...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five the speaker is Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim is a man who has become unstuck in time. He simultaneously is experiencing his life as a prisoner of war in WW II, a...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Rather than employing a conventional third-person ‘‘narrative voice,’’ the novel is narrated by the author himself. (eNotes) The novel is narrated by "Kurt Vonnegut". We will put his name...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
In Slaughterhouse-Five, one possible interpretation of Billy Pilgrim's journey is that he has become delusional or insane from his wartime experiences. One clue to this interpretation comes from...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
The word "Listen" in Slaughterhouse-Five serves as a directing word for the reader to understand that the style and focus of the story is about to change. At the beginning of the novel, the...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Most readers of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five obviously do not feel that the alien abduction subplot diminishes the novel. For these readers, the subplot adds to the humor, mystery,...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Individual readers will have to decide for themselves whether Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Slaughterhouse Five, has presented a credible depiction of the effects wartime stress can have on those who...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Much of the reason behind Vonnegut writing Slaughterhouse-Five has to do with the feelings he had witnessing the aftermath of the fire-bombing of Dresden. In order to make sense of the event and...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five is a very pessimistic book, and also a satire; the tone of the book is almost unrelentingly dark (or funny, depending on the reader's sense of humor), and so its reference to...
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut uses imagery of light and darkness in various ways in his novel titled Slaughterhouse Five. Examples include the following: At one point, Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time”...
