Slaughterhouse-Five Essay
“The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.” (Vonnegut, 75)
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is one of America’s greatest anti-war books and takes the reader aboard the emotional rollercoaster of Billy Pilgrim as he is stuck in time and relives his moments in the horrific bombing of Dresden. In a single paragraph, Vonnegut includes an anti-war standpoint, a remark about the innocence of humanity at the beginning of time and even manages to keep things from being in a chronological order; thus, crystallizing the entire book with this one paragraph and ultimately saying, you can rewind a movie but the ending will never change. In a single paragraph, Vonnegut crystallizes his work as a whole by including his hatred for war, his desire for a more pure and innocent human race and refrains from putting the events in a chronological order; ultimately saying, one can rewind a movie, but the ending will never change.
Slaughterhouse-Five is clearly an anti-war book. Focusing on the tremendously tragic bombing of Dresden, Germany, Vonnegut takes readers on a journey through the mind of a soldier suffering with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after his survival of the bombing that killed roughly 131,000 people. In the paragraph from page 75 (weird way of putting it…? HELP!) by taking away the war, everyone’s innocence is restored and instead of fighting each other, everyone works together to create two human beings whom at one point, were considered perfect. According to Vonnegut, war is the source of all corruption and destroys the purity that all humans are born with. Early on in the novel, Vonnegut makes it clear to his audience that the war damages a...