The Theme of War in Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut's - Essay Sample

Introduction

Slaughterhouse-five is a catharsis of the terrible experience that this author lived when being a prisoner of the Nazi forces, he had to go through the bombing and total destruction of the city of Dresden, perpetrated by the allies. Kurt Vonnegut narrates his experiences in the voice of Billy Pilgrim as a prisoner of war and a witness to the bombing of Dresden, thus marking the autobiographical content of the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man so tormented and possessed (haunted) by the past that he finds himself in need of reinventing his own reality. This re-invention will be carried out in a state of mental imbalance that becomes the confusion of fiction and reality, based on the elements that the character gathers in his readings of science fiction works. Vonnegut exposes the anguish of the modern Western man who still does not recover from the stigma of war and who lives in a world permanently on the brink of war (are the years of Vietnam, the arms race, women's liberation, and the Cold War). He satirizes everything that has engendered this man: fear of death, human pride and absolute faith in technological progress and material, which have led to a great spiritual emptiness and total hopelessness. However, the magic of Slaughterhouse-five is that it does not stay in a mere story that intends to invent historical facts, but goes further, away from the drama, and using satire, science fiction and black humor, with which it manages to erect a stark criticism of the war itself and the negative effects and physiological trauma caused by war.

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When he is recruited by the army, Billy Pilgrim is only 21 years old. Vonnegut represents him as a child who is not prepared for the experience of war: he has not finished college yet, he is a virgin and does not have the right equipment for a soldier. Billy and many children who are part of the army (like Roland Weary, 18) face a scene of destruction and death; to a hellish landscape. The experience of the war becomes a terrifying experience for the characters. At the end of chapter 2 the reader comes to what can be considered the climax of destruction, madness, and nightmare; to the center of hell represented with the war: Billy is fleeing from the German front along with Roland Weary and two other soldiers. He is permanently saved from death by Weary, at the same time that he tolerates his mistreatment. Weary has built a fantasy that he and the other two (more experienced) soldiers are the Three Musketeers, and this almost epic fiction is what has helped him survive until then. At a time when he complains about Billy, he accidentally mentions the soldiers this fantasy, and then they abandon them. Feeling rejected, Weary relives the trauma of abandonment and rejection that has been a constant in his life, and unloads himself in Billy, hitting him to the point of almost killing him, when five German soldiers appear avoiding such an outcome: "The soldiers' blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one would try to kill another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh "(Vonnegut, 1991: 51).

On a symbolic level, the journey to the underworld symbolizes the descent into the unconscious, at the same time as the contact with death as a "latent state", the reverse of life. The traumatic confrontation with the reality of the war marks then the origin of the dementia of Billy, the immersion in the unconscious. Several indications in the book allow reconstructing the process of trauma formation and psychosis in the character in his constant confrontation with the possibility of death and the feeling of life without value. When Billy survives the Battle of the Bulge: "Billy survived, but he was a dazed wanderer far behind the new German lines". (Vonnegut, 1991: 32). During the flight of the Germans, after the battle:"... Billy would not do anything to save himself. Billy wanted to quit. He was cold, hungry, embarrassed, incompetent. He could scarcely distinguish between and wakefulness now, on the third day, found no important differences, either, between walking and standing still. "(Vonnegut, 1991: 34);

The effect of the war can also be observed the moment when his father teaches him to swim by the sink-or-swim method in the YMCA pool, a fact that is compared to execution. At that time Billy almost drowned but is rescued, which he regrets. Abandonment in water is a symbolic expression of birth. The detail that Billy does not want to emerge from the water is a mark that the renaissance of the mythical structure does not take place. The figure of the father -representation, on the symbolic level, of the law and the cosmos- as executioner, shows Billy's conflict in his adaptation and integration to the world. From this moment, Billy is completely adrift, stunned and alienated in front of the world. After the war, Billy will lead a "normal" life, but increasingly absent from reality. At the same time, he will begin to build, with the elements of his science fiction readings, a parallel and Edenic reality according to his needs. Slaughterhouse-five is a somewhat complicated work to fit into a genre. It is a science fiction novel, that cannot be doubted. It has elements such as contact with extraterrestrials and time travel, typical of this type of literature. However, it is also irrefutable an anti-war novel that speaks of the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War and is very critical of the Vietnam War, which was developing at the time it was written. The subject of the death is very present in the book, several of the characters die although sometimes the death happens in sarcastic and surrealistic situations to tone with the humoristic content of the book.

Works Cited

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell, 1991.