Essays on Kurt Vonnegut

Many people believe that total equality for any race, sex, or religion is worth the effort. Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” focuses on individuals’ greatest qualities and the altering of them to exceed the average standard. For example, those of higher intelligence were forced...

Postmodernism emerged after modernism. This term is used to refer to a period in history. But it is also used to refer to a series of ideas in history. Postmodernism is a thought movement that emerged in America and then in Europe after World War...

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim. A former American soldier and prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. Billy suffers different hardships during his service to Dresden. He was a optometrist by profession. The story of Billy is told in flashback in...

Love. A simple yet ever so complicated emotion. How can an emotion that supposedly brings about such happiness and joy also bring about some of the worst characteristics of today’s world and lead to such catastrophe? The loaded concept of love and the problems that...

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (William Shakespeare). Kurt Vonnegut’s pessimistic view reflects...

In war, there is always one constant. Death is inevitable in war. Death can be a traumatic experience especially if someone has witnessed so much of it. In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut creatively portrays how war traumatizes and desensitizes people. Two motifs that repeatedly appear...

“Peace is a road to happiness and the future. War is a road to destruction and death.” – Debasish Mridha. It is well known the conflict between different nations or states, demolishes your own nation, affecting the development of the economy, takes away the life...

‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ is a science fiction novel written by Kurt Vonnegut. The author of this novel wrote about the bombing in Dresden during the World War II. The author of this novel witnessed as American Prisoner of War and he was able to survive by hiding...

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut explains his own encounters as prisoner of war from the Germans. The novel illustrates Vonnegut’s efforts to adjust with his individual war encounters. For instance, like Vonnegut, the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, is taken hostage by the Germans and shipped...

During the Second World War, Americans were sent into Germany to fight off Nazism, and when they came back home, it was hard for them to transition back to normal life. Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five was one of those soldiers, and in his book...

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, the author uses the protagonist Billy Pilgrims experiences to portray the damage caused by war. Billy Pilgrim, a veteran of WWII, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological disorders from his experiences in the war. Due to these mental...

Literature Review Postmodernism is dominant philosophical approach that questions and rejects the fundamental totality of human thought and homogeneous way of perceiving the outer reality of the world. , which is the main focus of present study with reference and application to Kurt Vonnegut’s The...

In today’s society, almost anything is possible to achieve, a fact that makes it so that nothing is ever as it appears. Things change constantly, whether we agree with such changes or not. This idea is especially notable in the people of the modern world,...

Although both “D.P.” and “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut are situated in starkly different time periods, these short stories touch upon the same idea of the individual’s status within society. “D.P.” takes place in an orphanage runs by Catholic nuns in the German village of...

Comparing texts from different contexts has enhanced our understanding of intertextual ideas, by continuing to engage with modern audience. Stories revolving around science fiction have remained timeless by discussing the various dangers of technology. Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Pedestrian (1951) depicts technology’s detrimental effects...

Post-World War II, scientists were considered the heroes of modern society. The nation’s science labs were heavily mobilized and federal spending on research development was over twenty times what it had been prior to the start of the war (Hampson). This society is what laid...

“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 of this tongue-in-cheek canon...

Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle asserts that our attitudes—as well as the behaviors that stem from them—toward the implications of scientific innovation impact the decisions we make. In doing so, he provokes the reader to investigate the potential repercussions of viewing science as a holy grail of...

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 different approach, one that is unmistakably...

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 employing a range of stylistic techniques intended to engage,...

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 random visits to all events in between.” (23)....

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 comfort in the idea that free will is a fictional...

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 piece of literature. One passage in particular has...

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 are too many similarities...

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 depicts the fragmentation of the...

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 circumstances? In many ways, the...

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...

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 color motifs and olfactory imagery. Vonnegut...

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 surroundings until its effects manifest in...