Speech Note Cards

‘How does the Universe end?’ said Billy. ‘We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a start button, and the whole Universe disappears.’ So it goes. This bizarrely nonchalant statement by the alien Tralfamadorians captures the tone of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about the callousness and destructiveness of war. Summarizing chaos is a daunting task. The reader is faced with sorting through chaos while reading through Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut skips through time and space as he unravels his tale. The book starts off with Kurt Vonnegut as one of the characters in the book trying to write a story about Dresden, Germany, and the terrible things that happened there during World War II. Slaughterhouse Five then immediately switches gears and goes into the life of the main character, a person named Billy Pilgrim. Billy becomes “unstuck in time” and throughout the book travels back and forth through time. He visits his birth, his death, and everything inbetween, focusing his time in World War II era, and the alien planet, Tralfamadore. The book was an eye opening illustration of the morbid destructiveness of war.

Vonnegut writes in a vivid and expressive style. One device he uses is allusion. He alludes to the real events of World War II, and transports the reader into the World War II era by quoting the speeches of famous leaders such President Harry S. Truman’s announcement to the world that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Another effective device used by Vonnegut is foreshadowing. He uses his invented aliens, the Tralfamadorians, who have already seen everything, to foreshadow Billy’s, life and death as well as the end of the universe. The Tralfamadorians even know when and who will destroy the Universe, yet they make no attempt to stop it because in their eyes it cannot be stopped. Vonnegut uses the motif, “so it goes” constantly throughout Slaughterhouse Five after describing the death of something, someone, a group of people, or even an idea. He uses it to make every death be on the same level no matter if it was intentional, accidental, on a huge scale, or the death of a single person. In the book Billy learns that the Tralfamadorians find the phrase comforting because although the person may be dead at this moment they were alive in all the other past moments. This makes perfect sense to them because they know all moments coexist and they can be viewed by time traveling.

Because of the constant repetition of the phrase it shows how much death is a major theme throughout Slaughterhouse Five, and eventually death is inevitable. Vonnegut’s book is not organized in any traditional sense. While describing Billy’s life the book does it out of order and constantly switches the year and location of actions. One moment they are behind enemy lines in Germany, the next Billy is being abducted by aliens and taken to their home planet. The fact that it was out of order added an element of confusion about what was exactly going on, which is exactly what people who are at war think about a lot. In the beginning of the book Vonnegut apologizes to his editor that his book is “jumbled and jangled.” He says this is because “there is not anything intelligent to say about war” I really enjoyed reading Slaughterhouse Five. It was thrilling and attention grabbing. This book made me think about my opinion about war. Vonnegut paints very shocking and disturbing pictures of war in his book; it makes war hardly justifiable in any circumstances. I particularly liked the references to World War II and to Germany. If there was anything I didn’t like it was the organization of the book. Jumping around in time made it a bit difficult to follow the storyline.

There are numerous parts in Slaughterhouse Five that are written in German so for anyone who likes to read about World War II, about Germanic themes, the politics of war, or enjoy science fiction Slaughterhouse Five is the book for you. My rating system was from one to five slaughterhouses. Each slaughterhouse has the potential to hold both life and death. Since this novel encapsulated life and death, in extreme circumstances, I rated it at the maximum of five out of five slaughterhouses. My mock cover put emphases on the explosive destruction of war. I featured a World War II bomber, and a fiery bomb-scape. My cover doesn’t underestimate the destruction of war. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in 1922, in Indiana. He started writing for his high school’s daily paper. As a college student he failed miserably in his major study of science but excelled as a writer for the college newspaper. On the verge of being expelled from college for poor academic performance he enlisted in the army. As a prisoner of war he was sent to Dresden to work in a factory. There he survived the bombing of Dresden by hiding in the cellar of a slaughterhouse. This experience colored his life.

In 1952 his first novel, The Piano Player was published followed by The Sirens of Titan in 1959. One of his most famous novels, Slaughterhouse Five was published in 1968. After that he published several more works and then spent years teaching creative writing at Harvard University. Vonnegut is known for his thought-provoking writing. He instills something in us. In this case he leaves us with the unspoken question: How can war be ended for all time?