Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut | Teen Ink

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

May 5, 2014
By kri14 PLATINUM, Rancho Palos Verdes, California
kri14 PLATINUM, Rancho Palos Verdes, California
21 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Favorite Quote:
Though I walk through a valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.


I found Kurt Vonnegut’s unique writing style to be as refreshing as it was effective. The choppy and disconnected narration that he incorporates throughout the novel both in sentence length and phrasing does not give the reader the chance to form strong emotions or opinions on certain events because Vonnegut never elaborates on big, traumatic events that one would expect. Instead, he creates a confused and chaotic series of stories told out of chronological order that forces that reader to become more of an observer of a mass of jumbled movie clips that will eventually elucidate themselves with the development of the individual stories. Not only does he continuously interrupt himself while narrating and begin telling a different part of the story without introduction, he focuses on tiny details that one comes to realize are irrelevant to the story save for constituting said unfocused, confusing delivery that again forces the reader to accept the series of events being presented as a continuous stream of occurrences that are difficult to connect to emotionally because of the rapidity with which they are explained and abandoned. For instance, at a dinner party that Billy Pilgrim has invited the failed author Kilgore Trout to, Vonnegut follows a conversation between Trout and a housewife friend of Billy’s that culminates in the summary of one of Trout’s terrible novels that first, makes no sense as a story in itself, and second, adds nothing to the overall plot except for the aforementioned nature of the delivery. This makes the reader almost immune to the emotions associated with such tragic events as a firebombing that wipes out an entire city because of the way the recounting of the events are thrown at the reader and just as quickly taken away. I really felt that this was what Vonnegut intended while trying to convey his point that death is inevitable and it is futile to try to avoid or prevent suffering. In addition, he repeatedly promotes the idea of predetermined events and that things will always happen as they were meant to. The way he forces the reader to understand his fragmented and scattered story parallels the message he sends about life; as we as readers are made to accept the mass of episodes presented to us in the form of a story, so are we as humans made to accept events as they occur and trust that in the end they will elucidate themselves.


The author's comments:
a review of my favorite parts of Vonnegut's masterpiece

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