Kurt Vonnegut: The similarities between the book and the movie Slaughterhouse Five

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Similarities and differences in movie and the book The movie, which was made upon the story from the book, has a good way of showing events that occurred. The movie, but also the book, is not about Billy’s wife Valencia, nor the Hollywood starlet, Montana Wildhack. It’s about Billy himself, through childhood, marriage, time travels (and sometimes flashbacks), war, death and nervous breakdowns. The actors in the movie, even though they hadn’t had much previous experience, were very good played. Billy’s actor Michael Sacks “who looks like a cartoon fall-guy copied in flesh” through the movie never got a chance to express his own outrage and not even were his thoughts presented, but he would simply end up speechless. On the other hand, in the book, reader can imagine what is Billy thinking and also, his abstraction was presented in a different way. In the book he had dialogs and monologue where the movie didn’t have so many. According to the Vincent Canby, the movie, but also the book is not enough outrageous, rather it is a time travel trick. Almost every time Billy falls asleep, he ends up time-tripping. That could also be explained as having bad dreams or, in some other situation, when he would “time-trip” while being awake, like a nervous breakdown, because soon after he would come to the “present” he would be shaken by someone. Also, it is very hard to distinguish in the movie and book, what actually is “the present”. The scenes in the movie about Billy’s time-trips were counted in “dozen times a day”. He would simply slip from the past and end up somewhere else at a different year, but also, those time-trips were just like visions. (Vincent Canby, The New York Times, March 23, 1972 “Film: Time – Tripping With ‘Slaughterhouse – Five’”) Vonnegut’s’ expressions, events, time-travels, emotions, feelings and thoughts of Billy Pilgram, but also other characters

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