Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
1. Briefly summarize the plot of the novel you read according to the elements of plot you've learned in past courses (exposition, inciting incident, etc.). Explain how the narrative fulfills the author's purpose (based on your well-informed interpretation of same).
- Billy Pilgrim attended Ilium School of Optometry before being drafted into the army during World War II. Billy’s father dies in a hunting accident shortly before Billy ships overseas Luxembourg. Billy is thrown into the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and is immediately taken prisoner behind German lines. Billy experiences the death of people first hand. Billy is transported in a crowded railway boxcar to a POW camp in Germany. Upon his arrival, he and the other privates are treated to a feast by a group of fellow prisoners, who are English officers who were captured earlier in the war. One night, Allied forces carpet bomb the city, then drop incendiary bombs to create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen into the blaze, asphyxiating or incinerating roughly 130,000 people. Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight meat locker. They emerge to find a moonscape of destruction, where they are forced to excavate corpses from the rubble. Several days later, Russian forces capture 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. After a nervous breakdown, Billy commits himself to a veterans’ hospital and receives shock treatments. Later years later, Valencia dies from carbon monoxide poisoning. 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.
2. Succinctly describe the theme of the novel.
- Sight; Billy attends optometry school before and after, the war. The author purposely chose the school of optometry as a theme of Slaughterhouse-Five. The slight is important because he experiences the war first hand. He believes after the war, he has become insane from the hallucination about alien kidnapping and taking him away from earth.
3. Describe the author's tone. Include a minimum of three excerpts that illustrate your point(s).
- The tone is mysterious and daunting. Vonnegut uses the words, “So it goes” every time a character someone personal or irrelevant dies. The way the author describes the characters and the setting shows that the author’s dark tone.
4. Describe a minimum of ten literary elements/techniques you observed that strengthened your include textual support to help illustrate the point for your readers. (Please include edition and page numbers for easy reference.)
a. Foreshadowing: The book foreshadows Billy’s visions and hallucination when he gets drafted to the military while he was in optometr y school.
b. Tragic Flaw: The tragic flaw is that Billy becomes insane and that his wife dies, he did nothing wrong, but after the war, it changed Billy, and at the end he is all alone.
c. Mood:The mood of the book is haunting almost depressing because it takes about the war and how he was locked up with other people. Billy watched many of the men die during the time e served, and every time someone died, “So it goes” is written.
d. Symbolism: The optometry school obviously symoblizes the eye sight in the book. Billy, invisions things because he terrorized by the war. Another symbolism is that “so it goes” represents death passing, even if someone dies, life goes on.
e. Narrative: The narrative is in third person. Billy is the main character, the readers are aware of what Billy is thinking. The narrative explains his hallucinations.
f. Irony:What’s ironic about Slaugtherhouse – five is that Billy who was a normal military man ends up getting hallucination about alien adubction. I am confused about the point of the aliens, but it’s ironic because it contridicts the book’s meaning about death and war.
g. Imagery: The imagery used when Billy has his alien invisions is vividly detailed. He describes them as taking Billy from the earth.
h. Allusion: Many allusions are made throught out the book, biblicial and references from other books like the three muskateers, greek mythology, and etc.
i. Diction: The diction is simple, understandable. The author does not use hard vocabulary, more readable and common. Use in every day language.
j. Foil: Billy’s wife is a foil character because she is described horribly. She is the opposite of a fictional character which makes Billy seem like a better character. The author intended his wife to be a foil.
CHARACTERIZATION
1. Describe two examples of direct characterization and two examples of indirect characterization. Why does the author use both approaches, and to what end (i.e., what is your lasting impression
of the character as a result)?
- The author only uses indirect characterization, he doesn’t formly describe Billy. Billy is created based on his actions. Valencia is described as “obese” which is the only form of direct characterization the author uses. The author uses both direct and indirect to the importance of the character. Indirect is a build up of characteristics and forming a connection with audience. Direct characterization is for characters who are breifly described, not important to the story.
2. Does the author's syntax and/or diction change when s/he focuses on character? How? Example(s)?
- No, the author’s syntax or diction doesn’t change, when the author describes the characters, the sentence (diction) flows throughly, although he focuses on the characters. Slaughter house five mostly focuses on Billy’s action than the story line and events that are happening around Billy. For example, when Billy marries Valencia, she is breifly described then at the end, Valencia dies.
3. Is the protagonist static or dynamic? Flat or round? Explain.
-The protagonist is round because Billy begins as a simple man in optometry school, from there he elavates to a soldier fighting in the army. Billy changes drastically after the events he experienced at war. Finally, near the end Billy diagonises himself as mental unstable because he experiences hallucination.
4. After reading the book did you come away feeling like you'd met a person or read a character? Analyze one textual example that illustrates your reaction.
- It’s hard to tell. Billy from my point of view was very closed about his life. He was reserved and never the one to speak. There was an emotional connection during the time he was in war, but afterwards he was distanced because his hallucination was so vivid.
