Story Summary

The story is about the life of Billy Pilgram, he is an optometrist that served in World War II. He was in Dresden the night that it got bombed, and this event caused him to have a lot of trauma. The trauma from the war made it so he became unstuck in time. This meant that at anytime he could jump to another point in his life. Many times he would jump back to the war and talk about what it was like being a prisoner of war and being in Dresden. One time he got captured by aliens fromTralfamadore. The aliens taught him that there is no such thing as death. A person will have always been in the past, the present, and the future. From these aliens Billy learned not to be afraid of death. He also had a wife Valencia. She really loved Billy and she died because she was trying to see him in the hospital. On her way to the hospital she got in a wreck. The wreck messed up her car, but she still drove her car to the hospital. Little did she know that her car was leaking gases into her car and when she got to the hospital that gases had killed her. In the story Billy teaches us that we need to look at the good things in life and not focus on all the bad things. Billy also said," God grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, courage to change the things i can, and wisdom always to tell the difference."

Critical Article

http://www.answers.com/topic/slaughterhouse-five-novel-7

Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut's most admired and discussed novel. In the story Vonnegut talks about the most important part of his life. The story was narrated by Vonnegut and in the first chapter Vonnegut only talks about how hard it was to right a book about the massacre he witnessed. Vonnegut makes the structure of the novel very "jumbled and jangled" much like the condition of the main character Billy. Billy's condition in the book is a symbol of confusion and the desire to be able to escape from war. Vonnegut wrote the book as a response to war and many critics have commented on the book's structure, style, and use of satire.

Critical Article

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_slaughter.html

This novel was a progressive work after Vonnegut got back from the war. It took Vonnegut twenty-three years to write the novel because of all the pain and suffering he had seen in the Dresden bombing. Vonnegut's main character is a very complicated character. He also had several problems from his war experiences and because Billy can't comprehend death he creates the Tralfamadorians. Billy is also an optometrist and corrects people's vision for a living. This is ironic because Billy also wants to change the way people look at their time and their life on earth. This novel suggests that if men don't change the condition of life on earth thet no one will. There is three main parts of the novel. 1) The book isn't so much about Dresden and more about the psychological impact of time, death, and uncertainty. 2) The main character isn't Billy, but Vonnegut and 3) It's an experimental novel with a lot of complexity. Vonnegut explains what's happening by using very little detail. This makes the reader form a mental picture and makes the reader think about what is going to happen next.

Critical Article

Many people think that Slaughterhouse-Five was an antiwar novel because of Vonnegut's experiences he had when he was in the war. Vonnegut used the book as therapy to try and solve the problems he got from fighing in the war. He writes the book in a way that lets the reader follow his path from being insane to recovery. By Vonnegut writing the book as psychiatric therapy it opens up many ideas of how to deal with your problems, it also shows us a lot about what was wrong with Vonnegut.Billy is a lot like Vonnegut because Billy also fought in a war and he faces a lot of trauma from it. One analysist said that in fiction novels there aren't any characters that have more problems that the characters of Vonnegut. Vonnegut wrote the story to help him out and in the story he made the main character have the same problems and diffuculties that Vonnegut was facing in real life.


This is a brief summary from the critical essay "Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: a psychiatric approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five" found on infotrac

post number uno

i'm reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. it was published in 1968. i plan on presenting my power point on Feb. 20.