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.