Slaughterhouse 5 Themes Essay Research Paper The

Slaughterhouse 5 Themes Essay, Research Paper

The Themes of Slaughterhouse-Five

The first theme of Slaughterhouse-Five, and perhaps the

most obvious, is the war and its contrast with love, beauty,

humanity, innocence etc. Slaughterhouse-Five, like Vonnegut’s

previous books, manages to tell us that war is bad for us and

that it would be better for us to love one another. To find the

war’s contrast with love is quite difficult, because the book

doesn’t talk about any couple that was cruelly torn apart by the

war (Billy didn’t seem to love his wife very much, for example.)

V onnegut expresses it very lightly, uses the word “love” very

rarely, yet effectively. He tries to look for love and beauty in

things that seemingly are neither lovely nor beautiful. For

example, when Billy was captured by the group of Germans, he

didn’t see them as a cruel enemy, but as normal, innocent people.

“Billy looked up at the face that went with the clogs. It was the

face of a blond angel, of a fifteen-year-old boy. The boy was as

beautiful as Eve.” (Vonnegut 1969 p.53).

An interesting contrast in Vonnegut’s books is the one

between men and women. Male characters are often engaging in

fights and wars, and females try to prevent them from it. The

woman characters are often mentally strong, have strong will, and

are very humane and loving. A good example is Vonnegut’s dialogue

in the first chapter, when he talks with his old friend O’Hare in

front of O’Hare’s wife:

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she

was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking

to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much

larger conversation. ‘You were just babies then!’ she

said.

‘What.’ I said.

‘You were just babies in the war–like the ones

upstairs!’

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish

virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.

‘But you’re not going to write it that way, are

you.’ This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

‘I – I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you

were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the

movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those

other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will

look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.

And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies

upstairs.’

So then I understood. It was war that made her so

angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s

babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly

encouraged by books and movies. (ibid p. 14-15)

Another place where Vonnegut expresses the previously mentioned

qualities of women is the part where Billy becomes “slightly

unstuck in time” and watches the war movie backwards:

When the bombers got back to their base, the

steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped

back to the United States of America, where factories

were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders,

separating the dangerous contents into minerals.

Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. (ibid

p.74-75).

In reality, of course, the women were building the weapons

instead of dismantling them.

The most often expressed theme of the book, in my opinion,

is that we, people, are “bugs in amber.” The phrase first appears

when Billy is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorian flying saucer:

‘Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,’ said the

loudspeaker. ‘Any questions.’

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired

at last: ‘Why me.’

‘That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr.

Pilgrim. Why you. Why us for that matter. Why anything.

Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs

trapped in amber.’

‘Yes.’ Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his

office which was a blob of polished amber with three

lady-bugs embedded in it.

‘Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the

amber of this moment. There is no why.’ (ibid p.76-77).

This rather extraterrestrial opinion can be interpreted as our

being physically stuck in this world, that we don’t have any

choice over what we, mankind as a whole, do and what we head for.

The only thing we can do is think about everything, but we won’t

affect anything. This idea appears many times throughout the

novel. This is one of the examples, when Billy proposes marriage

to Valencia:

Billy didn’t want to mary ugly Valencia. She was

one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going

crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her,

when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his

companion for life, (ibid p.107).

This excerpt directly shows that Billy didn’t like Valencia very

much and that he actually didn’t want to ma

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