Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut's World War II novel Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, is his most widely read, discussed, and taught book. It is a strange book, blending the genres of sci-fi, war novel,...

The birds in Slaughterhouse-Five make the sound “Poo-tee-weet”—something that is heard after a massacre. The sound “Poo-tee-weet” is a stand-in, a nonsensical noise made by birds that represents...

Billy is able to display a flippant attitude to death and mortality because he has been influenced by the Tralfamadorians, a strange race of aliens who bring him back to their planet to exhibit him...

Billy Pilgrim's name in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five has definite symbolic and connotative meanings. We can look at Billy as a common name for a common man that represents all men. We can also...

In the book, one major life-changing event appears to be the catalyst for Billy's non-linear time travels: his war-induced PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). We know that Billy's devastating...

At this point in the story, in chapter 3, Billy finds himself in a boxcar as a prisoner of war. The boxcar is crowded. The other prisoners of war pass around a helmet to be used as a chamber pot....

Chapter 1 of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is more of a prologue than a cold opening to the book. In this opening to his difficult-to-categorize but seriously surrealistic novel, Vonnegut...

The allusions to Adam and Eve can be seen as a symbolic contrast to the central action of the novel. They are symbols of innocence in high contrast to the folly and violence of war and pettiness...

Watching the war films in reverse, Billy Pilgrim sees war as restorative and peaceful. The film's action, going backwards, becomes truly inverted. Instead of planes shooting each other they suck...

Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is steeped in irony. The subtitle of the book, after all, is "The Children's Crusade." He opens the novel by speaking in his own voice and the refrain...

The giraffe passage is an interesting one; it reinforces the themes of alienation and apathy. In Billy Pilgrim's morphine-induced dream, he is a giraffe living among other giraffes. All his giraffe...

Concerning your question about Vonnegut's Slaughter-House Five, I suggest that the speaker's tone is detached understatement. You are certainly correct about sympathy being revealed by the tone,...

Billy Pilgrim's mother buys a crucifix from a gift shop on a family trip to Santa Fe; though she is not deeply religious, she buys it to make herself feel better in some way. It is a trivializing...

The answer depends on what you mean by "really time traveling." Billy does become “unstuck” in time, but it is not clear what that means. In a sense, as other answers have pointed out, the question...

Throughout most of the novel, Billy is living is life in reverse and also in fast forward. He is "unstuck "in time." Seeing the war movie backwards exemplifies Billy's experience of going back to...

Slaughterhouse Five presents elements of science-fiction and satire, but is most often categorized as literary fiction. This is true for several reasons, the most prominent simply being Kurt...

There are several reasons as to why Vonnegut would place himself in his popular novel Slaughterhouse-Five. For one thing, Vonnegut is a noted postmodern writer who frequently deconstructs the...

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...

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...

Obviously any two books about war will have elements in common. Still, one might expect, based on what we've often been told about how different Vietnam was from World War II, that the war...

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...

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...

Metafiction is a literary device employed in a fiction work that writes about fiction. The term meta generally refers to an astute awareness about something or oneself. Authors using this technique...

Though it's subtle enough that many readers probably would not recognize it, Vonnegut is arguably satirizing "conventional" science fiction in Slaughterhouse Five. A striking aspect of the novel is...

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...

Time-travel works on at least two levels or toward two purposes in this novel. 1. Time-travel is a thematic element of the novel, relating to notions of fragmented self/identity and to the...

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,...

Catch 22 has been suggested already, but that is the first novel that comes to mind and probably the most direct and obviously compatible connection to Slaughterhouse Five. An accessible, albeit...

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...

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...

This detail can be taken as a symbolic device that comments on the absurdity of the workings of human faith. In a story that is building up to a massive fire-bombing and which includes mention also...

Slaughterhouse-Five can be considered a kind of narrative pastiche in that it is written in a non-sequential way, assembling bits and pieces from different timelines which, in effect, also...

In chapter five of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim is “put to a bed and tied down, and given a shot of morphine” (p. 94). Another soldier named Edgar Derby volunteers to watch over him while he...

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...

There are a few ways to approach this question. Thematically, the fact that Billy is "unstuck" in time supports the idea that the past and the present are inextricably connected. ‘‘All moments,...

The English prisoners of the Germans are having a much different POW (prisoner of war) experience than Billy is. They have commandeered plentiful supplies through a paper error. Due to the wealth...

The types of destruction caused by war in Slaughterhouse-Five are physical and psychological. The novel describes the physical toll war takes. Description of the destruction caused by the bombing...

Slaughterhouse Five ends on a surprising note, with a bird tweeting "Poo-tee-weet?" to Billy Pilgrim. The ending is certainly not a conventionally happy one. The bird tweets a question that humans...

Edgar Derby was one of the prisoners of war who was in Dresden during the city's incineration by firebombing. He survived in the meat locker with Billy Pilgrim. In chapter 5, Billy remembers in a...

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...

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...

If we accept that anything presented in Kurt Vonnegut's novel is true, then we have to accept that Billy Pilgrim's experiences with the Tralfamadorians are real. Vonnegut constructs a...

Billy Pilgrim has trouble sleeping in Slaughterhouse-Five probably as a result of what he has experienced during world war two. Pilgrim experiences the battle of the bulge and the fire-bombing of...

Slaughterhouse-Five is a largely anti-war text showing not only the terrible physical destruction that war can bring, as in the firebombing of Dresden, but also the psychological trauma that a...

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” and...

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,...

Chapter 4 is probably the best location for a description of what the spaceship looks and sounds like. At this point, Billy knows that he is about to be taken by the spacecraft, so he goes out in...

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut uses repetition and verbal irony (understatement and litote) to reveal that Billy Pilgrim has experienced many deaths and that death is inevitable....

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...

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...