Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five Essay

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The world does not care. This is not to say the inhabitants of the world do not care but rather the world, as an object, does not care. It does not care whether humans fight, love each other, make millions of dollars, or oppress millions of people. The sun will rise and the sun will fall. Time will pass and the world will not care. It is a dark concept and one humanity does not like to recognize but it is as true as life itself. Kurt Vonnegut illustrates this very concept in his anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-5. The novel walks the reader through the foibles of a young, naïve soldier named Billy Pilgrim. As the story progresses, it is revealed that Billy, along with many of his peers, have no business being in war but there is nothing he nor they can do about it except ceasing to live altogether. One of the writing strategies Vonnegut employs throughout the book is that time is a human concept and that if a person can just look past the bad moments and focus on the good, then that individual’s life will be a fulfilling and meaningful one. These ideas of time being irrelevant, misplacement of the human soul, and disregard for the weight of a life can all be seen throughout Slaughterhouse-five…show more content…
Vonnegut chooses to end the novel with this, “Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, "Poo-tee-weet?”” (215). Taken out of context this seems like a very harmless and almost innocent passage but in context, the magnitude of it can be seen. The book ends with the uncovering of bodies throughout Dresden after the bombing that killed thousands of people. Mines were being set up with the sole purpose of finding, under the rubble and debris, a human corpse. What the bird represents then, is the world itself, it represents nature. By the bird doing no more than what a bird should always do, Vonnegut shows the reader that life goes

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