Slaughterhouse Five - Tone and Overall Feeling

Even from the first page of Slaughterhouse Five, the tone was not something I had expected. I have never read anything like this. The whole tone throughout the book was very blunt. With this being a war book, you would expect many adjectives and tragic descriptions making the events sound either better or worse than they actually were. However, that is not how it turned out.

Each paragraph of the book is short, but never lacks action. Vonnegut often leaves little room to completely describe what is going on. For example, he explains once “the stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.” This telling the story gives the novel a very dry tone. When the narrator says things such as that, it makes him seem like he feels somewhat emotionless about the book’s events. However, the narrator appears to lack emotion because what he is seeing is so traumatizing. In the end, the dry and sometimes blunt tone of the novel actually makes the war, and Billy Pilgrim’s life seem so real.

The dry tone makes the war seem worse because the lack of description requires you to imagine the environment of horrible tragedies yourself. What this does is give you an element of shock and surprise. When reading, you are almost never forced to see the entire situation yourself. The straight forward description is so surprising to you because this subject is normally so full of emotion. Overall, the dry tone of the book did not take away from the horrors of death, war, and confusion. It just showed how much those things change people’s lives for the worst. This will give you the honest truth of it all. The tone really gives the book the true feelings of war and what comes along with it.
I never imagined to read such an honest appealing book. I felt the true tregedy coming along with Vonnegut's feelings toward war because he had to really face the pain of it all. as Vonnegut says in the introduction, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters…" It does give us a moving portrait of your average soldier fighting a war he doesn’t understand, seeing things he cannot comprehend. Yet somehow he is supposed to continue living life as if massacres are somehow normal, acceptable things.

And so it goes.

Poo-tee-weet?

"The last word in Slaughterhouse Five and a symbol for peace and beauty but also for an unanswerable question parallel to the tragedies of war."

Billy(the main chararcter of Slaughterhouse Five) is reflecting back on his life and seeing the good in an overall bad situation. One of these positive memories of his life he looks back on is the trip to Dresden with O’Hare a few decades after the war.Vonnegut change up Billy’s mindset for once and Billy is thinking positively about his life. I think this is showing what Vonnegut is trying to say in his feelings after war about everything. He believes war is bad and can do all these horrible things shown throughout the entire book, but at the end of the day one must look at the positive side of things too.

  Billy travels back to the time after war has ended. Po-tee-weet, the last word of this book, is a pretty famous one and is a major symbol in this book. Billy has just been freed from the chains of wartime and violence. A huge weight has been lifted off his chest. As he is walking around as a free man, he hears birds singing to him. This could mean absolutely nothing but there is probably some deeper meaning that Vonnegut is trying to say here. In my mind soft, sweet sound of bird chirping could mean Billy has just been freed from after the war was over. It could symbolize all the beauty in this world that is overshadowed by the violence. Although, it also is seen as a symbol of a negative thought. That, nothing about war is even able to be described. The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say about war. Birdsong rings out alone in the silence after a massacre. The author’s point is made by the word "birds." Birds bring to mind innocence, peace, and calm. After the Dresden massacre, there was nothing because everything was destroyed. This brings to mind the image of a deserted wasteland filled with nothingness. The author’s attitude is very sarcastic because he cannot even understand it himself. When Vonnegut writes"and it always is," his words create emphasis on "except for the birds." There is irony in the fact that the author uses a bird tweeting to show the innocence of it after a massacre. There cannot be anything good to say. I think this is a perfect representation of the book overall. It is very negative, but this is how Vonnegut oversees war and everything that comes along with it. 

Slaughterhouse-Five, Warfare

Throughout the book Slaughterhouse Five, you could find many themes involved from writer Kurt Vonnegut. One that sticks out the most is warfare, considering this book is the reality of war and what it does to you.  

Slaughterhouse-Five is not about heroes and joyous times of war. It's about the privates, most of them who don't want to be, and shouldn't be on the battlefield. It's about prisoners of war, men who have been deprived of any kind of control over where they go and what they do. There is nothing what so ever romantic about war in Slaughterhouse-Five. It is actually portrayed that the villains of the book are the ones who continue to romanticize violence and killing. For Vonnegut, war is not about glory and heroism, but shown as an uncontrolled disaster for anyone or anything involved. The horrors of the war are so overwhelming that Vonnegut doubts his ability to write about them. Directly in the first chapter he says "It is so short and jumbled and jangled... because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." In reality, he is correct. There is nothing pretty and sweet about war. The book is unique in style and structure, which shows the anti-war theme. It shows many elements of literature,
including black humor, or dark comedy, which is a type of humor that amuses the audience with something that would normally be inappropriate to laugh at. In this case, war would serve as the subject. Kurt Vonnegut was subject to the life-changing effects of WWII, as a soldier and POW in Dresden, Germany. The many aspects of war, mainly the firebombing of Dresden, influenced Vonnegut greatly. Because of these events Kurt Vonnegut was inspired to write Slaughterhouse-Five, where he explains his feelings against war. Vonnegut best explains these feelings to his audience through many methods, but mainly through the novel's main character Billy Pilgrim, along with the Tralfamadorians who are alien like from another world that Billy time travels to, and in the themes, writing style, and structure of the book.

If you wanted the blunt honest truth of war, and what it does to you, this is the book to read. Vonnegut's feelings against war seem to be consistent both in the book and in his life. For example, according to Novels for Students, Vonnegut claims that "anyone who seeks glory and heroism in war is deluded."