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Sci Phi Final 2
Sci Phi Final 2
This essay started off as a blog post titled Climax of Slaughterhouse-Five. That blog
post focused on how the organization of the book left the reader with an incomplete story to
represent the missing stories of the people who died in the war. As I outlined this paper, I
realized that I wanted to address the lifelong effects war has on soldiers. I struggled to decide
which point I wanted to focus on more: the casualties of war or mental health of participants.
During the peer review process, I was informed I needed to be more focused, so I decided to
focus on the soldiers and mention the casualties of war in that context. I also made the paper
easier to read for people who had not read the book. Another peer review helped me to fix
awkward sentence structures and make the essay relate more strongly to my claim throughout. In
the last revision, I reorganized the essay to make a stronger claim about the effects of war on
soldiers in the beginning of the paper so that the evidence afterwards makes more sense. The
new structure better presents my argument because the evidence from the book now supports my
claim rather than introduces it. I also added more information about how time is used in the
book. Overall, this essay highlights how Vonnegut uses literary technique just as much as the
Dr. Holt
Science Fiction 12
8 December 2017
No End to War
Sometimes breaking the rules makes more sense than following them. Namely, books
have a beginning, a middle, and an end, in that order. Kurt Vonnegut chooses to make
Slaughterhouse-Five an exception to that rule, allowing him to forgo other typical literary
practices. For example, he labels the prologue Chapter 1, writes in first person even though he
is not the main character, and uses text breaks when the same scene or thought continues. Still,
the most significant abnormality is the lack of a major climax, created by manipulating time.
Vonnegut builds up to a big finale, but there never is one, resulting in a sense that there is more
to the story than is possible to discover. Vonnegut manipulates the flow of time to express that
the story of war is never complete for soldiers, who will always remember the lives lost, as the
Vonnegut chose to use the human inability to see time as a whole to share every part of
his story, but make sure that the reader keeps thinking about the issues he presented, lives lost in
war and the survivors who will never be the same. He needed each event to show The
Childrens Crusade, but concluding the story would make his experience something of the past
(Vonnegut 19). For Billy Pilgrim, the war always wages on as he jumps through time because, as
Tralfamadorians say, he is always in the war and he always will be, along with Roland Weary,
Edgar Derby, Kurt Vonnegut, Bernard V. OHare, Paul Lazzaro, and every other soldier. The
story of war never ends for them, so it should never end for the reader.
If told chronologically in the traditional sense, the story could have definite beginning
and end, but time follows Tralfamadorian rules in Slaughterhouse-Five. The aliens from the
book live in the fourth dimension, so they can see that everything happened, so the order doesnt
matter. As the pages run out, the falling action and resolution that usually conclude a book have
already occurred, and the climax was split into sections scattered through several chapters. The
book is like a puzzle that hasnt been put together yet. Since all the pieces are there, a
Tralfamadorian would be able to see the whole picture, but a human can only see pieces.
Although the reader has the entire story, it is difficult to see the story as a whole. Therefore the
reader cant place the events in a way that gives the book a true end.
Foreshadowing makes the absence of culmination of the story all the more apparent. A
chronological summary of Billy Pilgrims life is given at the beginning of the book. The rest of
the book expands on that summary, but in the order that Billy experienced it, jumping from time
to time as a stream of consciousness would move from memory to memory. The reader is never
in suspense waiting to know what will happen he or she already knows so they want to know
how and why it happens. Vonnegut only gives brief descriptions or focuses on small, seemingly
unimportant details similar to the details people remember from traumatic experiences so the
Vonnegut tells his war buddy Bernard V. OHare about the book he wants to write:
I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby, I said.
The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of
people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for
taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad. (6)
Whereas a traditional book might employ vague foreshadowing and then use Edgar Derbys
death as a suspenseful climax, Vonnegut continually mentioned it through the rest of the book: at
his introduction, in the prison hospital, on Billys honeymoon, again in the prison hospital, etc.
Now the reader expects a dramatic scene with every detail of the minutes leading up to Derbys
death, but there never is. Only a brief paragraph informs the reader that Derby has died. After all
the time spent foreshadowing Derbys death, the reader feels like there must be more to the story
ratio. The book finishes with the most momentous event of Billys life, an event foreshadowed
by the majority of the book, but only describes it briefly, omitting how it actually happens.
Vonnegut could have made the bombing one, huge, noteworthy climax, but spread it out in short
pieces throughout the last few chapters, making the recount of the actual bombing seem very
short and concise. Billys time in Dresden is interspersed with experiences from other times in
his life, preventing a successive timeline and refusing a sense of completion for the reader, just
Before deciding to rearrange time, Vonnegut had outlined the Dresden story many
times on one end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the
end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle. (Vonnegut 6) In those
outlines, the end was going home after the war, which is only described in the first chapter from
Vonneguts standing, never from Billys. However, just telling the story of the events of the war
was not enough to fully explain the bombing of Dresden. The later effects of the bombing on the
survivors lives also contributes to the story, like when Billy admitted himself to a mental
institute. The continued pain caused by Dresden carried through all time and could not be
No true complete story of a war will ever exist, and Vonnegut does not want the reader to
think that this story is the only one. Each person who died in World War Two could have written
a book about what they went through in the war, but never will.
Dresden had their own life that could have had an infinite
Instead, none of those timelines exist, and they are just one of
Soldiers see the nameless people. As Billy hears the bombs raining down on Dresden, he
thinks of all the people that hes seen that are being killed: the guards who had gone home to
their families, the showering girls he had walked in on, and everyone in the neighborhood near
the soldiers. The soldiers who have already suffered through the physical pain of war are sent
home to remember the lives of the people who died, whether they are fellow soldiers, enemy
soldiers, or civilians. With so many people killed, there is no limit to how different the world
could be if they had survived, and the soldiers are the only ones who can even begin to
comprehend the world of possibility that vanishes when a mass murder happens.
because it cannot be complete without contribution from those killed. The unconventional
timeline accomplishes that. Instead of the story drawing a line between a starting point and an
ending point in the direction of time, the book is structured like an ascending, widening spiral
one that can not stop (Allen). When the book ends, readers are left to keep climbing, and they
have to discover what all of this means to them without Vonneguts assistance.
Slaughterhouse-Five has no conclusion because Vonnegut knows he does not have the
right to conclude the bombing of Dresden. The story has no end. The absence of chronology
allows him to leave the reader without the satisfaction of knowing it is all over because it never
is. Too many parts are left unreported and can never be reported, and those who experienced it
will never stop experiencing it. It is cemented in time. Vonnegut wanted the reader to understand
that this still happens; war still happens; innocent people die for being born in the wrong place;
young people continue to die as expendable soldiers. In Billys life and the real world, So it
Works Cited
Death. Dial Press trade pbk. ed., New York, Dial Press, 2009.