Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
I enjoyed Vonnegut's commentary on the strangeness of humankind's foibles and I was not shocked by some of his matter-of-fact depictions. Indeed, when Vonnegut draws on his own real-life experiences, the novel takes on an air of authenticity. This authenticity coupled with Vonnegut's wry, black humor makes the novel seem caustic and ironic, but at heart it is neither -- it is simply a record of things both real and imaginary told with the same kind of remove that Voltaire employs as he pushes Candide along on his ridiculous adventures.
I hesitate to say that I was enlightened by reading the novel. I might say I was as enlightened as I was entertained, and cannot say I found it to be the most entertaining novel I have ever read. The non-linear narrative is so full of false-starts...
Whatever enlightenment is gleaned must be gleaned at a remove, just as Vonnegut writes a remove. That said, reading "So it goes," after every time a death is reported is amusing at first, but the joke quickly wears thin.
I do not believe I am a better person for reading it. If anything I am probably aware of being a worse person. That of course is no judgment on the novel -- after all, great novels tend to let us realize how inefficient we are when it comes to behaving humanly. Whether it is possible to behave well or rightly is a question the novel poses -- but it is difficult to answer the question within the confines of the novel, for Vonnegut posits it between the tweeting of a bird and the fatal awareness of death just around the corner.
Works Cited
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. NY: Random House, 2009. Print.
Works Cited
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. NY: Random House, 2009. Print.
The critic called Vonnegut "overrated at best" and goes on to say, "Like many inferior novelists, he films better than he reads" (33). On the other hand Peter Reed talks of the novel's depiction of many "grim" and "downright painful" scenes sliced together to sustain the impression of concurrent actions that "intensifies" the interrelationship of events transcending time. The novel conveys an image of life that is not always beautiful,
Destructiveness of War in "The Things They Carried" and "Slaughterhouse Five" Summary “The Things They Carried” is a series of stories in which the narrator Tim O’Brien describes the experience of soldiers in the war. The term denotes the things that the soldiers came with to war. Some of the things are intangible such as fear and guilt while others are physical things such as M-16 rifles, morphine, and matches among others.
A Vonnegut theme, however, is often hard to miss; especially since part of Vonnegut's style placed the author in a position where many readers could palpably feel him throughout the novel. Vonnegut seems to read alongside the reader and assist him; he seems to teach and guide -- gently -- as well as write. As such, Vonnegut helped re-define what high art, and the novel specifically, could be: Irving, who
Starting with the names of the characters and continuing with many of the events in the novel, he is ironically picturing a consumer society that needs to rely on certainties in order to secure its present and avoid alienation, which is why the entire conspiracy theory is developed: to provide explanations. The manner in which the novel is written provides a surrealistic picture which alludes to realities of the 1960s
Down These Mean Streets believe that every child is born a poet, and every poet is a child. Poetry to me was always a very sacred form of expression. (qtd. In Fisher 2003) Introduction / Background History Born Juan Pedro Tomas, of Puerto Rican and Cuban parents in New York City's Spanish Harlem in 1928, Piri Thomas began his struggle for survival, identity, and recognition at an early age. The vicious street