Friday, May 21, 2010
Question One
From the very beginning, Slaughterhouse-Five is a unique novel in the sense that its message is not the typical anti-war message. Vonnegut does not give his opinion or say war is wrong. In contrary, he describes the bombing as beautiful. Vonnegut simply gives the facts of what happened to inform the reader, and says “so it goes” after all the deaths because there is nothing we can change. I am sure living through something as horrible as the bombing of Dresden caused Vonnegut to have many emotions that are hard to deal with. He wants to get the point across that war is inevitable, that no society is capable of having utopia. Therefore, Vonnegut does not go into much detail about the deaths and instead focuses on specific memories that trigger other emotions. In the novel, no one is heroic or evil; everyone is equally unimportant. The “good guys” sometimes die and no one person really has any significance in the big scheme of things. Vonnegut also describes the soldiers, himself included, as babies because war is childish and foolish in many ways. The tone is very straightforward because Vonnegut does not want to deceive the reader or make things seem better than they are. The story lacks a structure for the most part. I think this is because time does not really matter. There will always be problems, whether it is war or not, in the past, present, and future. The main message I picked up from Vonnegut’s novel was to focus on the good times in life because no matter how bad things are at the moment they will be better at some point.
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6 comments:
He also says that people should concentrate on the good times because war is inevitable.
This is very well-written and perfectly describes the way the novel deals with war. They ways that Billy deals with war is hard to describe, because he does not directly think about it, but always is reminded of it. I really liked the way you wrote about everything and took into consideration that Vonnegut may feel the same way as Billy.
I definitely agree with Jessss
Especially when you're referring to Vonnegut's motif: "so it goes", relating to the character's emotions to meaningful events.
definitely agree with you*
I thought this was also very good at describing the story as an anti war novel. You were very good at considering the tone, subject, and story structure. It is true that he never straight out said that he was against war. He is a holder of many emotions and he uses them to tell his story of war in a different way.
I do very much agree that Kurt Vonnegut says anti-war is a messed up way. He says war is beautiful, in an incredibly sarcastic way, and it is very effective at being an anti war message.
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