Slaughterhouse Five – Analysis

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Slaughterhouse Five or The Children's Crusade,first published in 1969, was Kurt Vonnegut's response to the horrible massacre at Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five during troubled times in America. There were the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the march of blacks against racial inequality, and the widely unpopular involvement in Vietnam, where the Americans dropped more explosive power than all of the countries combined in World War II. Even though Vonnegut intended his novel to be an anti-war novel, he acknowledged that his efforts were most likely futile. Vonnegut likened being anti-war to being anti-glacier, meaning that wars, like glaciers, will always exist. Vonnegut added, "And, even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death." (p. 3)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922- ) is an accomplished novelist, playwright, and artist. Although sometimes viewed as a science-fiction writer, Vonnegut gained most of his renown as a social satirist. He fought in WWII as a member of the U.S. Army from 1942-1945, and was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the American bombardment that leveled the city and claimed over 130,000 lives. Vonnegut is also known for his use of irony and wildly inventive humor, the latter which seems to have a cult following.
In the opening chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, it is clear that Vonnegut is the narrator because of the references to events in his life, such as his study of Anthropology at the University of Chicago or his residence at Schenectady, New York. Vonnegut talks about the process of writing his novel, which he figured would be an easy task, but turned out to be much longer process than he expected. When Vonnegut visited his old war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare to reflect upon the massacre, Bernard's wife Mary made Vonnegut promise to write that most of the soldiers were "…fool…