Literature Analysis Questions: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

1. Briefly summarize the plot of the novel you read.       
   Slaughterhouse Five is  mainly a story about a man named  Billy Pilgrim, who is an optometrist and time traveler. The novel follows Billy as he lives the events that have happened in his life over and over again. Vonnegut makes the reader read awesome imagery of  the terrors of war, "the quiet desperation of suburban life" and the breakdown of the psych  through Billy's time. Just before he is captured as a prisoner Billy experiences his first time jump. When this happens he sees his whole life, past, present and future, right in front of his eyes. After the war, Billy returns from Europe back to his civilian life, but doesn't stop randomly  jumping through time, witnessing his birth, his death and big events in between. He is eventually abducted by aliens who experience time in almost the same way, but Billy would rather only look at his life's better days. Ignoring his family's objections, Billy told the world about his time traveling and about his abduction, glorifying the story with a detailed version of his death.

 2. Succinctly describe the theme of the novel. Avoid cliches.
   Time and memory: The science fiction parts of the novel have to do with time travel. Billy leaps in time, experience his life's events out of order and repeatedly. He learns on the alien world of Trafalmadore that all time happens simultaneously, but no one really dies. But it has a evil side, the bad times also live  forever. Memory is one of the novel's important themes, because of their memories, Vonnegut and Billy cannot move past the Dresden massacre. Billy leaps back in time to Dresden again and again, but  we read a lot about  Dresden  because Billy relives it in his memory multiple times.

 3. Describe the author's tone.  Include three excerpts that illustrate your point(s).
      I think Kurt Vonnegut writes in a  morbidly humorous tone.
ex 1/ "The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.”
ex 2/ "So it goes.Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them. And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt."
ex3/ "If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still—if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.”

4. Describe five literary elements/techniques you observed that strengthen your understanding of the theme and/or your sense of the tone.  Include three excerpts (for each element) that will help your reader understand each one.
   1/ Hyperbole

> The hyperbole that Dresden resembled the moon serves to reveal

> "Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals."

>The Americans and their guards come out of their shelter to see the devastation of Dresden and Billy remarks that it looked like the surface of the moon.

   2/ Ellipsis

 > "Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore."

> In the hospital, Billy is telling Rumfoord about what happened in Dresden.
> The ellipsis between Billy's travel to Tralfamadore and his return to Earth
  3/ Juxtapose
> "roses and mustard gas"
> The phrase is used to describe an awful smell, whether it be Vonnegut's breath when he has been drinking or the smell of the "rotted and liquefied" bodies in Dresden.
>The juxtaposition of the beauty and sweetness of roses with the debilitating effects of mustard gas serves to emphasize the theme of the destructiveness of war, that war can make even the most beautiful things, like the roses, horrible and disgusting.
  4/ Parody
> "The United States of America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations... Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by angry Chinamen... Billy predicts his own death within an hour... At that moment, Billy's high forehead is in the cross hairs of a high-powered laser gun... In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead. So it goes.">
After hearing Lazzaro tell a story about his revenge on a dog that bit him, Lazzaro tells Billy that he will eventually kill him for Roland Weary's death. Billy then recounts how he will die at Lazzaro's hand.
>Vonnegut's description of Billy's future seems to parody science fiction novels.
  5/Ambiguity
> "One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?"
>Billy and the rest of the Americans were let out of the locked stable they had been staying in because the war in Europe was over. The only sound Billy could hear were the birds "talking."
> The phrase that the bird speaks, "Poo-tee-weet," is ambiguous in its meaning.