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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 wars contrast with love is quite difficult, because the book doesnt talk about any couple that was cruelly torn apart by the war (Billy didnt seem to love his wife very much, for example. ) V vonnegut 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 didnt 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 OHare in front of OHares 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 warlike the ones upstairs! I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood. But youre not going to write it that way, are you.
This wasnt a question. It was an accusation. I I dont know, I said. Well, I know, she said. Youll pretend you were men instead of babies, and youll 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 well have a lot more of them.
And theyll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs. So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didnt want her babies or anybody elses 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 Tralfamadorians 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 dont 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 wont affect anything. This idea appears many times throughout the novel. This is one of the examples, when Billy proposes marriage to Valencia: Billy didnt 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 didnt like Valencia very much and that he actually didnt want to marry her. However, he was stuck in amber. Or, for example, Billy knew the exact time when he would be killed, yet didnt try to do anything about it. Anyway, he couldnt have changed it. The death bears comparison with mankind's fate. The main thing Vonnegut probably wanted people to think about has something to do with wars on Earth.
Vonnegut says so in the part where Billy discusses the pro bless about wars with the Tralfamadorian's (p. 117). They tell him that everything is structured the way it is and that trying to prevent war on Earth is stupid. This means that there always will be wars on Earth, that we, people, are designed that way. There might be people striving for eternal peace, but those people must be very naive and probably dont know humankind's nature.
We know that wars are bad and we would like to stop them, but we are stuck in amber. This point of view also might explain why there are no villains or heroes in Vonnegut's books. According to Ernest W. Reply, all the characters are Comic, pathetic pieces, juggled about by some inexplicable faith, like puppets, (Riley 1974 p. 454). If there is no-one to take the blame for the bad happenings in the book, it can only mean that the villain is God Himself (or Herself or Itself or Whatever from Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus, 1990). God Almighty had to be the one who put us into the amber, who had created us the way we are.
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces, (Vonnegut 1969 p. 164). Another theme of the novel is that there is no such thing as a soldier. There is only a man, but never a soldier. A soldier is not a human being any more. Vonnegut expresses this most obviously in this extract from the time when Billy was imprisoned in Dresden: When the three fools found the communal kitchen, whose main job was to make lunch for workers in the slaughterhouse, everybody had gone home but one woman who had been waiting for them impatiently.
She was a war widow. So it goes. She had her hat and coat on. She wanted to go home, too, even though there wasnt anybody there. Her white gloves were laid out side by side on the zinc counter top. She had two big cans of soup for the Americans.
It was simmering over low fires on the gas range. She had stacks of loaves of black bread, too. She asked Gluck if he wasnt awfully young to be in the army. He admitted that he was.
She asked Edgar Derby if he wasnt awfully old to be in the army. He said he was. She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be. Billy said he didnt know. He was just trying to keep warm. All the real soldiers are dead, she said.
It was true. So it goes, (Vonnegut 1969 p. 159). Stanley Scott said: Vonnegut opposes any institution, be it scientific, religious, or political, that dehumanizes man and considers him a mere number and not a human being, (Riley 1973 p. 348) and I think that this attitude shows up in many other books by Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano, Hocus Pocus etc. ) Another obvious theme of the book is that death is inevitable and that no matter who dies, life still goes on. The phrase So it goes recurs one hundred and six times: it appears everytime anybody dies in the novel, and sustains the circular quality of the book. It enables the book, and thus Vonnegut's narration, to go on.
It must have been hard writing a book about such an experience and it probably helped the author to look upon death through the eyes of Tralfamadorian's: When a Tralfamadorians sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorian's say about dead people, which is So it goes, (ibid p. 27). The Main Message of the novel As you noticed, the book has different messages; everybody may see something else as its main meaning. I think that Vonnegut wanted to tell us, the readers, that no matter what happens, we should retain our humanity. We should not let anybody or anything reign upon our personalities, be it a god, be it a politician or anybody else. We should be ourselves human and humane beings.
I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which great upon the ground. So it goes. Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.
And Lots wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. 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, (Vonnegut 1969 p. 21 - 22). References: Brifonski and Mendelson (Editors); Contemporary Literary Criticism vol. 8 Detroit: 1978; Gale Research Co Riley, Carolyn (Editor); Contemporary Literary Criticism vol. 1 Detroit: 1973; Gale Research Co Riley, Carolyn and Barbara Harte (Editors); Contemporary Literary Criticism vol. 2 Detroit: 1974; Gale Research Co Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. ; Slaughterhouse-Five; or Childrens Crusade, A Duty Dance with Death New York: 1971; Dell Publishing 336
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Research essay sample on Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol Theme Of The Book
