Slaughterhouse Five and Pan's Labyrinth: A Comparison of Themes, Juxtapositions, and Structure Anonymous 12th Grade

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 Pan’s Labyrinth and Slaughterhouse Five illuminate several juxtapositions of birth, death, fantasy and reality that are highlighted by Del Toro and Vonnegut.

The juxtaposition of birth and death between the two works which are both about war provide an intriguing comparison between the concepts of the works. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut focuses the novella on death as he repeats one statement following every single death, no matter the location, the purpose, or the person, a statement that finds its form in the phrase “So it goes”. Vonnegut chooses to incorporate the repetition of this phrase to serve as a bridge across time periods and settings, highlighting the pointlessness and unavoidability of each and every death caused by the war by framing all of the deaths so casually and dismissively. There is no choice to accept that death comes hand in hand with war, and the only option that people have is to accept this as true. Vonnegut writes in short, declarative sentences to...