The isolation of individuals often leads to the loss of motivation to fight against corrupt systems within a world of upheaval, but when individuals unify, they are able to maintain the hope and aspiration necessary to confront these systems. Kurt...

World War II is remembered as a struggle against an obviously evil entity; it was the Allied forces’ fight to put down the Axis powers and bring to an end the Nazi’s fascist regime. Allied troops are often exalted as heroes, and remembered for...

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is the tale of a gawky World War II veteran/soldier, Billy Pilgrim. His wartime experiences and their effects lead him to the ultimate conclusion that war is unexplainable. To portray this effectively,...

"Fate: 'what has been spoken,' a power beyond men's control that is held to determine what happens" (Webster's Intermediate Dictionary 270).

Everywhere in the world, people attribute events to fate because of the belief that one has no control...

THIS IS A NOVEL SOMEWHAT IN THE TELEGRAPHIC SCHIZOPHRENIC MANNER OF TALES OF THE PLANET TRALFAMADORE

The foreshadowing of events in Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five' is as much a subtle indication of things to come as it is an expository...

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five is, at first glance, nothing more than a science fiction tale of one man's travels to another planet and his ability to view his life out of chronological order because of his power to time travel. There...

War has, undisputedly, been an element of every civilization's history throughout time, but the cause of war, however, is a topic of dispute. Is war something that humans bring on themselves, or has it been deemed inevitable, no matter the...

During times of war soldiers experience horrific atrocities that are mentally and physically crippling. Most cannot begin to comprehend these sinister and morbid images due to their lack of military experience. In Kurt Vonnegut's...

One of the most distinguishing aspects of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is the structure in which it is written. Throughout the novel, Billy Pilgrim travels uncontrollably to non-sequential moments of his life, or as Vonnegut says, “paying...

Minor characters may not be the center of action or attraction, but novelists can use them to supplement the understanding of major characters and the thematic purpose of the text. In his novel Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969, Kurt Vonnegut...

Throughout the course of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader is taken through the life events of Billy Pilgrim, a character who amazingly lives through the Dresden firebombing and many other tragedies. Ironically, Billy finds...

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five has been the subject of much attention and debate since its release. Its wide range of topics such as critique of the American government and discussion of existentialism have made it an extremely controversial...

We see playful children - giggling, laughing, not a care in the world - and envy their innocence. Their spirits have not yet been hardened and jaded by the world around them. Our lives are made up of a series of moments, big and small, that...

Can fiction, when challenged beyond the boundaries of logic, ever develop into reality? Post-modernist thinking is a way of manipulating the beliefs and concepts that shape literature, but even more so the typical methods of storytelling....

Trauma is a tricky thing. It hurts people deeply, and then tricks them into believing they have forgotten about it or have overcome it. It nests deep within a person’s soul, perched between fragile emotions and memories, contaminating its...

Despite the fact that Kurt Vonnegut ends the novel Slaughterhouse Five in a manner that provokes the reader to believe it shows that the conflict has reached closure, the very end of the novel represents a new beginning. The author uses the last...

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five we are taken through the strange life of a Mr. Billy Pilgrim. The story revolves primarily around Billy’s time in Germany during WWII but also several other points in Billy’s life. What the reader will...

Assuming you got a message anonymously, informing you that you were going to die because of a car accident tomorrow at noon, would you use this message to try avoiding death or would you simply accept and embrace your destiny? Many people,...

Guillermo Del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five mirror each other in that fact that both feature a main character who struggles to accept the realities of war, but the works vary in various ways. Details from both...

The concept of war is both gruesomely tragic, and deeply absurd. Through their respective texts, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, authors Joseph Heller and George Roy Hill capture the very essence of war, and it’s tragic absurdity, though...

In a literary text, imagery enables the author to appeal to human senses through the use of vivid and descriptive language. Kurt Vonnegut incorporates this rhetorical device throughout the text of his novel Slaughterhouse Five, through the use of...

This essay will examine Vonnegut’s presentation of gender identity in relation to the postmodernism, concluding that Vonnegut uses conventions of postmodernist literature, such as a suspicion of metanarratives, intertextuality and a fragmented...

"See the cat? See the cradle?" retorts the midget Newt in an attempt to explain the inspiration for a grotesque and confounding painting of his. This singular quote is the namesake for Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, and embodies the leitmotif...

Understanding ourselves and the surroundings that shape us is no small feat. Sci-fi novels time and time again have attempted to address such topics by manipulating and distorting the future in a different light. But Kurt Vonnegut takes a...