The extreme destruction and burning that came of the bombing of Dresden in 1945, rendered in both Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse IV, violently terrified the population of Dresden and the world as they grieved over the estimated civilian casualties of somewhere between 24,000 and 40,000 people. Information about the firebombing remained classified until 1978, when the U.S. Air Force divulged many of the documents revealing the Allies’
In the passage Vonnegut alludes to the “fire-bombing of dresden” calling it “the greatest massacre in European history” (pg. 101). This use of both a hyperbole and allusion, represents the great traumatic effect that the bombing had on both the character Billy Pilgrim and the narrator, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut uses a hyperbole here, because the bombing of dresden was not the the most deadly event in Europe, to show the extreme effect the war has on people, because in their minds the event becomes
not narrated in a linear mode from the first chapter till the last one, the novel consists of ten chapters that make the readers jump back and forth in the author’s life- from his return to Dresden on a Guggenheim grant to his return home from the war two decades earlier, from a conversation on the telephone with his
to ignore the bombing of Dresden and treat it with no obvious signs of empathy. These actions show a similarity to the passage taken from On the Natural History of Destruction by Sebald which discusses how people deal with destructive events. The characters in both Slaughterhouse Five and the given passage from On the Natural History of Destruction act as if the bombings in Germany had no effect. The passage from Sebald’s book refers to how people in Germany react to the bombings and how their way
specific use of character in relation or reaction to setting, and in their eschewing of the linear narrative form. Both writers employ main characters who struggle against the mental fall-out of having experienced catastrophic events – with the World War Two-era firebombing of the German city of Dresden, in particular, playing a central role in each novel – and both authors reject or disrupt the linear narrative structure with frequent shifts in narrative time. Rather than truly deal with the traumas
SlaughterHouse-Five, which indirectly told of his experiences in World War Two and the bombing of Dresden. The article claims that the story is a “highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic” piece. While I agree with Lehmann-Haupt that Slaughterhouse-Five is effectively written with the use of imagery, I maintain that what makes Vonnegut’s war novel legendary is the communication, both direct and indirectly, of his anti-war sentiments. At the beginning of the book review, Lehmann-Haupt reminds
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, is a classic American anti-war novel. The story takes place during World War II and is told non-linearly through the flashbacks of a chaplain’s assistant. This feckless, pathetic, funny-looking character is named Billy Pilgrim. Billy has no desire to live, yet people keep saving him anyway. He even survives the Dresden Fire Bombing, which serves as the climax of the book. Through experiencing everyone’s death but his own, Billy Pilgrim has a Tralfamadorian ideology
chilling details of war, but also a book of the facts of war, the side effects of life, and the consequences of dealing with all of that at the same time. Vonnegut writes in cycles and intertwined timelines to show his reader how trapped one can become in his own life, even just in his mind. Billy pilgrim is an average veteran, keepsake from battle and all, except a diamond ring is not the only “prize” he got from is time at war. Through Billy Pilgrim’s coping with life after war and his memories,
is a life after death. Even though he is enlisted to go to the army, and after he was sent to fight in Germany. Actually Billy throughout the novel firmly avoids joining in with the conflict of any kind; he survived a brutal war without carry a gun throughout the entire war. Such is the character’s aversion to violence that when an antitank gunner asks him “what he thought the worst form of execution was Billy [has] no opinion” (26). Vonnegut portrayed Billy with positive attributes, even though
Vonnegut really emphasizes the destruction of war throughout the whole book; it seems to be the central theme. In the first chapter, Vonnegut discusses the process of writing Slaughterhouse-Five, and how he really wanted to inform the readers of the Dresden War. There are many settings in this book, including Dresden, where the bombing would occur and kill thousands of innocent people. We also get to see the main character, Billy Pilgrim change throughout the war from trauma. The promise Vonnegut made to