Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Book Analysis) E-Book

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• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 30

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Unlock the more straightforward side of Slaughterhouse-Five with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!

This engaging summary presents an analysis of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, who suffers from a very unusual condition: he time-travels back and forth throughout his own life. In his youth, Billy is one of the few survivors of the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War, but he learns to overcome the lingering trauma of this experience when he is kidnapped by aliens known as Tralfamadorians and adopts their fatalistic worldview: that death, like everything else, is inevitable. Billy then decides to devote his life to spreading this doctrine. This satirical novel about the deep psychological scars left by the trauma of war was heavily inspired by Vonnegut’s own experiences as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, and is considered one of the most significant anti-war novels of the 20th century.

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This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:

• A complete plot summary
• Character studies
• Key themes and symbols
• Questions for further reflection

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Leseprobe

KURT VONNEGUT

AMERICAN NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER

Born in Indianapolis in 1922.Died in New York in 2007.Notable works:Cat’s Cradle (1963), novelJailbird (1979), novelA Man Without a Country (2005), essay collection

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1992. His father Kurt Sr. was an architect, and his mother Edith was from a wealthy brewing family. Vonnegut wrote for and edited student newspapers at high school and Cornell University, where he found writing to be more enjoyable and less stressful than his degree in biochemistry.

Having enlisted in the US army in 1943, he was sent to Europe in late 1944, captured soon after, and lived through the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden as a prisoner. When he returned home, he married Jane Marie Cox and studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, working as a reporter at night, before becoming a full-time writer in 1952. Vonnegut’s early novels were extremely varied in style and content, sometimes containing elements of science fiction, and were moderately successful. He rose to fame when his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five became a bestseller. He wrote sporadically for the next decade due to personal difficulties, but then published a series of successful novels through the 1980s and 90s. He died in 2007 in New York.

Today, Vonnegut’s work remains extremely popular with the general public and is also widely studied in academic environments. Fellow writers often comment on the ease with which he wrote, despite the fragmented style he employed and the often difficult and painful subjects that he tackled.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

A SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ANTI-WAR NOVEL

Genre: novelReference edition: Vonnegut, K. (1991) Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell Publishing.1stedition: 1969Themes: war, death, trauma, time, determinism

Between 13 and 15February 1945, the British and US air forces bombarded the German city of Dresden with high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices, causing a firestorm that completely destroyed the centre of the city and killed approximately 25 000 people. A group of American prisoners of war survived in a meat storage bunker underground, among them a 22-year-old Kurt Vonnegut. For years after the war, Vonnegut struggled to write a book about Dresden, finally publishing the semi-autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969. Following an opening chapter which deals with the author’s troubles in writing the book, the novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, whose life shares many elements of Vonnegut’s own wartime experience. Since Billy is subject to a kind of involuntary time travel, the narrative makes seemingly random jumps between the lead-up to and aftermath of the bombing and different parts of Billy’s post-war life as a successful optometrist. Bizarrely, these episodes include Billy’s abduction by aliens and his time spent on the planet Tralfamadore as an exhibit in a zoo. With its jumbled narrative and decidedly non-heroic protagonist, Slaughterhouse-Five portrays the senselessness of war from the perspective of the ordinary young people whose minds and lives are profoundly altered by it.

SUMMARY

A NOTE ON THE NOVEL’S STRUCTURE

Slaughterhouse-Five has a distinctly unconventional structure. The narrative takes the reader back and forth in time, and to a planet 446 120 000 000 000 000 miles away from Earth, as Billy Pilgrim involuntarily travels through time to different parts of his life. In this guide, the events of Billy Pilgrim’s life are summarised in chronological order, after a brief summary of the novel’s opening chapter, in which a narrator describes the challenges of writing a book about Dresden.

WRITING THE BOOK