Slaughterhouse-Five Essay

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Quin Brown Crook 4EP Period B August 28, 2013 My Honor Pledge Applies!!________________ Summer Reading Essay: Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut’s classic fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five is based off of Vonnegut’s World War II experiences. Through the character Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut highlights the brutalities of war as “the center” of his story (K and G 184). For the whole of the book, Vonnegut emphasizes a “war is not glamorous” theme. Vonnegut starts his anti-war novel by explaining within the story why he is writing Slaughterhouse-Five. He is attempting the impossible by writing an anti-war novel; he is trying to create world peace. As one of the characters in the book explains to the narrator, writing an anti-war book is like writing “an anti-glacier book” (Vonnegut 4). Like glaciers, Vonnegut realizes wars cannot be stopped. The objective of his novel is therefore to inform the public on the brutalities of war instead. He wants people to be aware that war is not as attractive as some make it out to be. When the narrator goes to talk to his old war buddy Bernard O’Hare, Mary O’Hare hates that her husband’s friend is writing this war novel. She believes he should call the novel “‘The Children’s Crusade’” since many men are sent to war as “babies” (18-19). She wants his book to stop the reoccurring cycle of men getting sent to war who are still innocent boys. She understands as a husband of a war veteran and as a mother of boys that war is a terrible part of society. The narrator even tells his sons in the novel not to get involved in “massacres” and that the hearing of massacres of people should never “fill them with satisfaction or glee” (24). Because the narrator has been through war and seen its atrocities, he does not want his sons ever to participate in the killing of people Using Mrs. O’Hare, the narrator’s sons and others;
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