Slaughterhouse Five Report Essay Research Paper Chapter

Slaughterhouse Five Report Essay, Research Paper

Chapter 1

In this first chapter, we see that the book is based on real events. Vonnegut, like the narrator, is a veteran of World War II, an earlier prisoner of war, and a witness to a great massacre.

Vonnegut shares with us that he can t write about the horror of Dresden. There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, but he feels that he has to say something. The book shows the author’s struggle to find a way to write about what he saw so that it neither makes it seem good or bad. We keep this in the back of our minds as we read about Billy Pilgrim’s life.

The author is a character in the narrative. He is Kurt Vonnegut, the former POW, and he speaks of the many times he has tried and failed to write this book. It is Kurt Vonnegut, too, who says the first, “So it goes” after relating that the mother of his taxi driver during his visit to Dresden in 1967 was incinerated in the Dresden attack. “So it goes” is repeated after every death. It becomes a slogan. ralfamadorian philosophy (something you will find out about later). But because the phrase is first uttered by Vonnegut, writing as Vonnegut, each “So it goes” seems to come directly from the author.

Chapter One also hints that time will be an important thing to follow. The author was going around and around in circles trying to create a timeline. He felt like he was stuck inside a children’s song that repeats itself again, and again, and again The children s song s last line is also the first. Only when the author begins to think about time, about returning over and over to the events of someone s life, about moments existing for eternity in no particular order , is he able to break through twenty years of writer s block, and write Slaughterhouse Five.

Chapter 2

The constant skipping around in time can be confusing to the reader because we are used to linear narrative. The way you feel reading the narrative is like to the way Billy Pilgrim feels as he skips uncontrollably through his life. There is little suspense in the novel. The outline of Billy’s life is given right off the bat. What is more important is the fact and experience of Billy’s, of his dazed wandering through the events of his life.

How are we to understand Billy’s time travel. Should we believe it. Is this science fiction. Or a true story. Should we trust his sensible daughter, who thinks that her father is losing his marbles. After all, Billy first comes unstuck at a moment when he is ready to die. He is exhausted, clueless, and lost behind enemy lines. He has no idea what is happening or what has happened. People keep shooting at him, pushing him around. Under these conditions his understanding of time is permanently altered and his mind becomes (temporally) unhinged.

Human dignity in a life marked by death and mass murder is important to Slaughterhouse Five. In the first stages of his war experience, Billy Pilgrim is a man without dignity.

Chapter 3

Chapter Four introduces the Tralfamadorian concept of time, a concept that will be explained in Chapter Five. This is what Billy Pilgrim is given to understand: that people, Tralfamadorians, and everything else are like bugs in amber. They are locked into their fate. Why me. is a useless question .

The fact that we are locked into our fate: Billy’s death is determined years before it happens when Roland Weary meets Paul Lazzaro. Though Billy is starved, sick, and half-dead, we know that he will not die in the boxcar, the prison camp, or even in the city of Dresden; where nearly everyone else is killed. He will in fact die because one pathetic, and friendless human being, Paul Lazzaro, who feels like avenging the death of another pathetic, and friendless human being, Roland Weary.

One of the books many jokes about war occurs early in this chapter. Billy sits down to watch a war movie, and due to his time difficulties, watches it backwards. Planes fly backwards, magically quelling flames, drawing their bombs into steel containers, and sucking them back up into their bellies. Guns on the ground suck metal from the pilots, crew, and planes. Weapons are shipped backed to factories, where they are carefully disassembled down into their minerals. The minerals are shipped to specialists all over the world who “hide them cleverly” in the ground, “so they never hurt anybody ever.” And in Billy’s mind Hitler becomes a baby and all of humanity works toward creating two perfect people named Adam and Eve.

Chapter 4

The Tralfamadorian concept of time is a revelation to someone who has come unstuck from his own lifeline. Billy realizes that he has access to a new perspective on life, pain, suffering, death, and joy. If there is no free will, if each moment is planned so that it can only happen the way they are supposed to happen, then, it makes sense to accept things as they come . The “so it goes” attitude, comes from visiting all the moments of one’s life countless times. Death is no longer as permanent than any other moment. Billy finds some comfort in this, and takes the Tralfamadorian advice to look at the nice moments as much as possible.

The Tralfamadorian novel discussed at the beginning of the chapter is a model for Slaughterhouse Five. A Tralfamadorian novel contains brief messages that describe events, scenes, and situat