Kurt Vonnegut (1922- 2007)

Kurt Vonnegut was a fourth generation German-American who was born in Indianapolis, Indiana
on November 11th, 1922. His father was a well-to-do architect whose fortunes, job opportunities,
and mental health fell off drastically with the Great Depression. During his teenage, Vonnegut
attended Short ridge High School, where he served as a writer and editor on the school paper,
The Short ridge Daily Echo. When he finished high school, he enrolled in New York's Cornell
University. He had to leave his studies aside because In 1942 he joined the U.S. Army where he
served in World War II. During the military, he received training as a mechanical engineer.
However, on 14th December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of
the Bulge. As a prisoner of war, he survived the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces on 13
February, 1945 in an underground meat-storage cellar: "Slaughter house five". He later was put to
work pulling corpses from the ruins of the desolated city once known as "the Venice of the
North.". It was a catastrophe! In one night the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden killed more people
than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, more than 135,000 in all.
Vonnegut was liberated by Red Army troops in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian
border. Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a
"ludicrously negligible wound."

After his arrival in the U.S., Vonnegut married his high school friend Jane Marie Cox. He spent the
next couple years pursuing an M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago but his thesis,
"Fluctuations Between Good & Evil in Simple Tales", was declined. He later, in 1971, received his
M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago: apparently the University decided to accept
his novel Cat's Cradle in lieu of a formal thesis.
It was in 1951 when Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, which dealt with the notion
that excessive replacement of human labor by technology would rob human beings of a sense of
purpose.

Many tragic and depressing events Vonnegut had to go through, such as his father's death in 1957,
and, to make matters worse, the following year, Vonnegut's sister died of cancer, whose husband
had died in a train accident two day after she passed away. The tragedy left the couple's four
children orphaned. Thats why Vonnegut and his wife, who already had three kids of their own,
adopted the eldest three children. Eventually Vonnegut adopted another child, Lilly, bringing the
number of his brood to seven. His marriage lasted until 1970 when he separated from his wife to
move in with the photographer Jill Krementz. Another downward turn came in 1972 when
Vonnegut's son, Mark, experienced a schizophrenic breakdown. Such situations devastated
Vonnegut. He once attempted suicide but there were people who stated that he tried to kill
himself twice. The first occasion occurred in 1984 when Vonnegut attempted suicide with pills and
alcohol. While the second event was in In January of 2000 when his house caught fire, and he had
to be hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Apparently, while Vonnegut was in bed watching TV. an
ashtray overturned, and he tried to extinguish the flames with a blanket. Ironically Vonnegut, who
had smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes for decades, called his smokes "a classy way to commit
suicide" and expressed consternation that they had not done their job yet. Finally, in 2007, Kurt
Vonnegut passed away at the age of 84 due to a fall down the stairs



Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with
Death (1969)
Summary
It is a story about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier named Billy
Pilgrim. Vonnegut's use of the firebombing of Dresden as a central event makes the novel semi-
autobiographical, as he was present during the bombing.
Main Themes
- Fate and Free-Will: Billy learns from the tralfamadorians that if we cannot change anything
about time, there is no such thing as free will. After all, free will means the ability to alter your
own future. In fact, the Tralfamadorians tell Billy that the whole idea of free will seems to be
unique to Earthlings. Everyone else in the universe knows better. Billy uses this knowledge to
comfort himself about the realities of aging, death, and pain. Even if human beings have to suffer,
at least there is nothing to be done about it. Billy's resignation isnt necessarily a good thing but
makes him feel better. It was a way of protecting himself from the horrors of war. This is pictured
in the recurrent phrase So it goes, which helps Billy and Vonnegut to cope with miseries of war
by thinking that it was inevitable, it was all already written
- War: the story is not about great battles and heroes, it is about what war does to people, the
suffering and the desensitization
- Freedom: it is a book about the different ways people get trapped: by the army, by family,
and by their own beliefs in God or glory. It is not only the Germans or the U.S. Army who take
away Billy's choices. He also finds himself caving in to the expectations of his mother, his
optometry office, and even his own daughter. Billy sees very little real freedom in his life,
which is perhaps why he is so eager to accept that there is no such thing as free will.
Main characters
- Billy Pilgrim: Billy is the main character of Slaughterhouse-Five, but he's not exactly the hero of
the book. Or rather, he doesn't have the heroic qualities usually associated with the main
soldier in a story about wartime. Billy believes that in 1944 he became unstuck in time. One
reason that he is so incredibly nervous and awkward all the time is that he never knows which
part of his life he is going to be performing next. He is abducted by the Tralfamadorians, an
alien race, but there is plenty of evidence throughout the novel that suggests that Billy is
suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or inventing the story to make his memories
about war less traumatic.

- The narrator: He talks from the first person perspective about the experience of writing this
very novel, and he mentions lots of details about his own life that match Vonnegut's own
biography. He interacts with Billy in different parts of the story, suggesting he was Billys
comrade or that the narrator is telling the story about himself and using the character of Billy
(real or invented) as a device.

- The Tralfamadorians: The alien creatures who bring Billy to their planet to exhibit him in a
zoo. In many ways, the Tralfamadorians are subtly compared to the Germans. The first thing
the Germans do when Billy arrives at their prison camp is to make him take off his clothes,
which is also the first thing the Tralfamadorians do when Billy arrives on their planet. When a
German prison guard punches an American in the face and the American asks why, the
German answers, "Vy you? Vy anybody?". Similarly, the Tralfamadorians refuse to consider
the question "why" they abducted Billy: they say, "There is no why".But most important, the
Tralfamadorians, like the Germans, totally remove Billy's choices: they take him captive and
there is nothing Billy can do about it. The lessons the Tralfamadorians teach Billy about time
are kind of a mixed blessing. It comforts Billy to think that time is totally predetermined and
unchangeable and there is no free will. This Tralfamadorian faith in the total pointlessness of
trying to change anything makes Billy feel like everything he has gone through, no matter how
awful, could not have gone any other way.

Setting
The setting of Slaughterhouse-Five is wide-ranging, but the two most important places are
Germany during World War II and "Ilium," the fictional town in upstate New York where Billy
Pilgrim lives most of his life.

Narrator
First Person (Peripheral Narrator)
The narrator is a character in this novel: there are first-person sections in both the first and last
chapters, and he appears periodically throughout Billy's travels through Germany. The narrator
also spends most of his time telling us about Billy rather than about his own life, which is why we
can be thought as peripheral. At the same time, a great amount of Billy's feelings and experiences
seem to come from a third-person omniscient narrator, who has complete access to all of Billy's
thoughts and feelings. This is not narration from the perspective of a person who is separate from
the main character and making observations about his feelings. In some ways, Billy's story reads
like a thinly veiled and fictionalized version of the narrator's own life. The lines between the
perspectives of the narrator's "I" and Billy Pilgrim's "he" are not entirely clear.


Genre
The story contains features of a semi-autobiographical novel. It contains elements of the author's
life in it but most of the narrative is focused on a fictional character. The bombing of Dresden is
the main engine of the story, which Vonnegut experienced himself. As for the science fiction
genre, Slaughterhouse-Five uses the elements of science fiction time travel and aliens but it is
also self-conscious about considering what science fiction is used for. Billy and Eliot Rosewater
read science fiction because their own realities no longer make sense to them. They need invented
realities that work by different rules because their own lives have lost meaning.
The constant confusion about when or even whether the different events of the novel happen
mean that readers are constantly kept at some distance from Billy Pilgrim and his life story. By
using the author as a character in the book and by telling Billy's story out of order, the novel itself
keeps reminding us that Billy's story is fiction. This manner of storytelling indicates a degree of
skepticism about the idea of a unified self or the possibility of realistic narration that characterizes
postmodernism.
Features of post-modernism: Black humor, temporal distortion, hybrid genre, blurs reality and
fiction, Truth is relative, meta-fiction (on the first and last chapter, the narrator explains why he
wrote the novel)
Tone:
Aloof, deadpan .
The narration in the book does not contain much description. The narrator seems reluctant to big
displays of emotion. He describes emotion in pretty unsympathetic terms. He reacts the same if it
is a man or bacteria. Yet, at the same time, the narrator is telling us about the horrors of war. He is
describing horrific events that have huge impact for him personally. Even if he doesn't tell us
directly how to feel about these events, because there is so little emotional description, the
overall impact of the scene seems much bigger than you would expect from such brief passages.

Writing style
The novel's writing is minimalist and dry, and Vonnegut tends to write in short, declarative
sentences. Each tiny section is dense with dialogue and action
Irony
Throughout the entire novel, Vonnegut using the literary element of irony to portray his ideas and
to evoke something in those who read his novel. The main reason he uses irony is to poke fun at
life in general, and to question the motives behind many things. One way he used irony in the
novel was to describe the shooting of an American soldier for stealing a teapot after the Bombing
of Dresden.
Little>Big
Kurt Vonnegut is always focused in on the smaller aspects of an event. Or just the little things in
life. Big events such as a death get blown off by the infamous words "so it goes". When speaking
of Lot's wife Vonnegut writes, "But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so
human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes"(22).Vonnegut uses the small events to
point out things such as the irony in situations. He also blows off the big events in such a way that
it creates this sense of dark edgy humor amongst him and the reader.

Censorship controversy
Slaughterhouse-Five has been the subject of many attempts at censorship, due to its irreverent
tone and purportedly obscene content. In 1972, a circuit judge banned it on the grounds that it is
depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian. In the novel, American soldiers use
profanity; his language is irreverent; and the book depicts sex. It was one of the first literary
acknowledgments that homosexual men, referred to in the novel as "fairies," were among the
victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
In the USA it has at times been banned from literature classes, removed from school libraries, and
struck from literary curricula;

however, it is still taught in some schools. Slaughterhouse-Five is the
sixty-seventh entry to the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently
Challenged Books of 19901999. Slaughterhouse-Five continues to be controversial. In August
2011, the novel was banned at the Republic High School in Missouri. The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial
Library countered by offering 150 free copies of the novel to Republic High School students on a
first come, first served basis.