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."