![]() Tralfamadorians believe that life is full of set moments that cannot ever be changed but can be visited at any time at random. While Vonnegut believes in a man’s ability to change his fate, Pilgrim is convinced by his imaginary abduction by aliens called Tralfamadorians that a person’s life is already planned to follow a set course from birth until death. This places Billy, as the protagonist, in the place of an anti-hero which gives the book a clear anti-war message (Marvin 124). The choice to convey Billy as passive and unenthusiastic about life makes him the exact opposite of the typical hero in war stories. ![]() While Vonnegut seems to have an attitude of wanting change in the world and striving to accomplish his goals, Pilgrim is an extremely passive character which makes him a very odd choice as a protagonist in a war story. The story’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is in some ways the same as and in many other ways totally different from Vonnegut. Through using perspectives unlike his own to tell Billy’s story and talk about war, Vonnegut is able to make the reader focus on their own thoughts and opinions rather than his. ![]() By showing himself as an Army scout alongside Billy, Vonnegut “dispel any thought that Billy Pilgrim was an autobiographical rendering of the actual author” (MacFarlane 151). The narrator serves to tell Billy’s story entirely through his own voice which allows Vonnegut to interject a few small comments of his own into the story, proving his views to not be congruent with those of the narrator. Due to the similarities between him and his protagonist “Vonnegut creates a mask, a narrator who provides a certain distance between” (Schatt 99) Billy and his author. While Vonnegut makes Pilgrim similar to Vonnegut in his war experiences, he does not exactly represent Vonnegut’s life or perspective. To tell his story Vonnegut uses three different characters with varying opinions and perspectives regarding the story of Billy Pilgrim. ![]() Still, the pressing issue stands that “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre” (24) which makes writing about one all the more difficult. Vonnegut decided that it was his duty to write about Dresden to expose the truth about the attack and its severity. He finds it reprehensible that this attack, which seems purposeless for anything but revenge, had been kept almost entirely secret by the government. (Freese 77) War brings out an inhumanity in people that is unfathomable to Vonnegut. He recognizes the evil of Nazism and that the war was a necessary feat but cannot stand behind the attack “designed by the Allies to kill as many German civilians as possible” (Allen 95) as well as annihilate the beautiful and historic city of Dresden which held little to no value to the German Military. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five he uses a blend of realism and utopian imagination along with dark humor to deromanticize war.Īs a German-American who fought with the allies in World War II, Vonnegut is torn between both sides of war. “For Vonnegut the subject matter is not simply Nazi atrocity it is many other things” (Lundquist 43) such as many people’s obsession with revenge, issues of racism, and most importantly the question of how to tell a true story that is unimaginable to the point of borderline fiction. Vonnegut seeks to show the reality of war and how damaging the evil verses good image has been on society as it contends humans against each-other. This heroic and manly battle of pure evil against pure good is the exact picture that Kurt Vonnegut strives to destroy through his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The good and innocent all live peacefully afterwards while the evil are punished and forced to take responsibility for the war that they inevitably have caused. Incredible heroes fight against evil and give peace back to the good. For centuries war has been romanticized as a heroic battle between a purely good side and the evil side.
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