Date: Feb 11 2023

Analyze of
Slaughterhouse-Five,
or,
The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
Written by
Kurt Vonnegut

Working Team:
Khelaifa Lalmi
Miloud Ouarekh
Ferhat Bekkari
Akram Garel Metred
Mohamed Ali Sahraoui

Outline:
1. Summary of the story
2. The writer style and works
3. Postmodernist themes in the novel
4. Characters presentation
5. References
1. Summary of the story:
Pilgrim is born in 1922 and grows up in Ilium, New York. He has
weak appearance and comic looking. He was intelligent student in high
school, and joined to in night classes at the Ilium School of Optometry,
and is pushed into the army during World War II. He trains as a chaplain’s
assistant in South Carolina, where got a post of judgment during practice
battles and declares who survives and who dies before they all sit down to
lunch together. Short time before Billy left to join an infantry regiment in
Luxembourg. His father dies in a hunting accident. The first battle Billy was
the Bulge in Belgium and the last because he was taken as prisoner. Just
before his catch, he experiences his first incident of time—shifting: he sees
the entirety of his life, from beginning to end, in one sweep.

Billy is brought in a crowded railway boxcar to a POW camp in

Germany. He meets with English officers who were captured earlier in the
war. Billy suffers from psychology crises lead him to drink a dose of
morphine that sends him time-tripping again. Soon he and the other
Americans travel onward to the beautiful city of Dresden, that considered
calm relatively in war time. As condition the prisoners must work for their
keep at various labors, including the manufacture of a nutritional malt
syrup. Their camp occupies a former slaughterhouse. One night,
everything seems routinely until Allied forces damaged the city, and its
target to make end life in this city, in fact nearly of 130,000 people died
soon. Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight meat locker. They
appeared to look the volume of destruction of the land where they are
forced to dig corpses from rubble. After short, Russian forces dominated
the city, and Billy’s involvement in the war ends.

Billy returns to Ilium and finishes optometry school. He gets engaged

to Valencia Merble, the obese daughter of the school’s founder. Billy
suffers from nervous breakdown, because of he treated in veterans’
hospital and takes shock treatment. A fellow patient introduces Billy to
the science fiction novels of a writer named Kilgore Trout. When he
passed its nervous crises, he gets married. Billy makes trade in world of
optometry business with help of Valencia father. Billy and Valencia raise
two children and grow rich.
 Billy declared on a radio talk show, that he captured by two-foot-
high aliens who look like upside-down toilet plungers, who he says are
called Tralfamadorians. They take him in their flying saucer to the planet
Tralfamadore, where they mate him with a movie actress named
Montana Wildhack. She, like Billy, has been brought from Earth to live
under a transparent geodesic dome in a zoo where Tralfamadorians can
observe extraterrestrial curiosities. The Tralfamadorians explain to Billy
their point of view of time, how its entire sweep exists for them
simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When someone dies, that person
is simply dead at a particular time. Somewhere else and at a different time
he or she is alive and well. Tralfamadorians prefer to look at life’s nicer
moments.

Billy comes back to Earth and did not declare anything about those
events. In 1968, he exposed to plane crashes into a mountain, among the
optometrists, only Billy survives. A brain surgeon operates on him in a
Vermont hospital. Valencia dies of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning
after crashing her car. Billy’s daughter takes him to house and provides
the care by a nurse in Ilium. In that moment he feels the appropriate time
to talk about what he learned before. He escapes to New York City, where
he goes on a radio talk show. After that, he writes a letter to the local
paper. His daughter is felling with his life end and does not know what to
do with him. Billy makes a tape recording of his account of his death,
which he predicts will occur in 1976 after Chicago has been hydrogen-
bombed by the Chinese. He knows exactly how it will happen: a vengeful
man he knew in the war will hire someone to shoot him. Billy adds that he
will experience the violet hum of death and then will skip back to some
other point in his life. He has seen it all many times.

2. The writer style and works:

Vonnegut's own style of writing tends to be minimalist and dray, utilizing
short sentences and avoiding wordy run-on sentences. In his works he
employs themes of pacifism, social equality and the need for common
dency through subject matters of war, technology, sexuality and violence.
He has several works for instance:
 The Sirens of Titan.
 Mother Night.
 Cat's Cradle. ...
 God Bless You, Mr. ...
  Slaughterhouse-Five. ...
 Breakfast of Champions. ...
 Jailbird.
Easily Vonnegut's most well-known work, Slaughterhouse-Five was also
one of the hardest for him to write due to its closeness to his own life.

3. Postmodernist themes in the novel:

3.1. The fragments:
It includes the life of Billy based on Vonnegut‟s life, his fictionalized
experience of fire-bombing in Dresden and the Tralfamadorian plot
as in confrontation with life on earth. The fragmented parts of Billy
Pilgrim, life in the different sections are linked through time-travels.
3.2. The Ontological Dimension:
In Slaughter-House Five, Billy pilgrim shoulders the responsibility in
gaining the goal as a “transworld identity”. Billy was “taken through a
time warp” by the Tralfamadorians” so that he could be on
Tralfamadore for years, and still be away from Earth for only a
microsecond”. In other words, we, readers encounter “a
confrontation between our world and a world whose norms permit
time- travel”.
3.3. Stream of Narration as a Technique:
Stream of narration is, as you know, mainly concerned with narrative
conventions. It defies linearity and foregrounds the ontological world
of the text as producing different meanings and interpretations by
the readers. In this novel we can found that in different positions for
instance in: …. Vonnegut starts describing something, chooses a key
point in that matter, elaborates on that key point so that the reader's
mind is distracted, then he goes back to the issue at hand. In the first
chapter the narrator is diegetically describing the process of writing
his novel using realistic points, but all of a sudden, the process turns
to be the reality of the text because he is revealed as one of the
characters in the narrative of his novel: One end of the wallpaper
was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, there
was all that middle part which was the middle…. The end, where all
the lines stopped, was a beet field on the Ebbe, outside of Hall… we
were formed in ranks, with Russian soldiers guarding us-Englishmen,
American’s thousands of us about to stop being prisoners of war.

4. Characters presentation:
5. References:

Slaughterhouse-Five, Last seen: Feb 11 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

1969, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr
Published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1970.

The 10 Best Kurt Vonnegut Books, By Marc Leeds | Nov 11, 2016
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-
sheet/article/72006-the-10-best-kurt-vonnegut-books.html

Writing 101: All the Different Types of Characters in Literature, Last

updated: Sep 2, 2021
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/guide-to-all-the-types-of-
characters-in-literature

Slaughterhouse-Five (film), 1972, Directed by George Roy Hill and

produced by Paul Monash, Production Universal Pictures.