Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse FiveKurt Vonnegut is a world-renowned author with a history of very influential books. Vonnegut has one of the most unique writing styles of any author ever. In many of his works, including Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut uses autobiographical elements. Parts of the stories connect to a moment in Vonnegut’s life. Vonnegut also uses very creative themes to explain what is going through his character’s minds or to explain a person or events. Slaughterhouse Five is an interesting, yet upsetting novel that uses a character named Billy Pilgrim to explain Vonnegut’s fears and struggles when he was in war.
Kurt Vonnegut, who is still living today, was born on November 11, 1922. His parents were Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and Edith Vonnegut who were very important to Vonnegut in his life. He has one brother, Bernard, and one sister, Alice. Vonnegut attended some very helpful colleges, namely Cornell University, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Chicago. Vonnegut became a prisoner of war on December 22, 1944 after the Battle of the Bulge and survived, but helped his ideas on writing. His most popular writings include Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House, and Cat’s Cradle. After realizing the shrinking of the Short Story market, he began concentrating entirely on novels.
The novel Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, details the events in the life of one Billy Pilgrim, as told from the view of an unidentified man close to Billy when he was in the army. In fact, there is never any indication that the subject, Billy Pilgrim, ever met the narrator. This doesn’t subtract from the story, however.
When we first meet Billy, he is in the midst of time travel, which he has been taught the secret of. It is revealed that Mr. Pilgrim grew up the son of a barber, and was scrawny and funny looking as a child and young adult. He grew up to become an optometrist, optometry being a profession that made him a great fortune. It is soon explained how Billy learned the secret of time travel. On the day of his daughter’s wedding, aliens from the planet Tralfamadore abducted Billy. These creatures explained to him that time as an Earthling concept didn’t exist. He was told that time was just a lot of moments in no particular order, that moments weren’t a string of beads with a particular order, but that they could go out of order and be repeated by someone who knew the secret. They said that...
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