John+SlaughterHouse-Five

=    __ Slaughterhouse-Five __       = =    By: Kurt Vonnegut       =

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Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He studied at Cornell University from 1940 to 1942. Soon after he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Vonnegut was sent by the army ro Carneigie Mellon University to study engineering in 1943. The following year he served in Europe and fou ght in the Battle of the Bulge. After the battle Vonnegut was captured and was a prisoner of war. He witnessed the Allied firebombing in Dresden, Germany. He escaped harm because he was working in an underground meat locker making vitamins. Later after his return from war he married his girl friend from high school Jane Marie Cox. Together they had three children and they also adopted his siter's three children after her death in 1958. It took Kurt many jobs to start off his writing career. Kurt Vonnegut is considered one of the most influential American novelists of the twentieth century. His style included blending literature with science fiction and humor, the absurd with pointed social commentary. In each novel Vonnegut created his own unique world filled with unusual characters. Some of his novels include //Player Piano// (1952), //The Sirens of Titan// (1959), //Mother Night// (1961), and //Cat's Cradle// (1963). War was a continuing element in Vonnegut's work, one of his best-known works, Slaughterhouse-Five, draws some of its dramatic power from his own experineces. Vonnegut became wel known for his unusual writing style- long sentences and little punctuation- as well as his humanist point of view. He continued to write short stories an novels ,including //Breakfast of Champions// (1973), //Jailbird// (1979), and //Deadeye Dick// (1982). Along with that Kurt Vonnegut made himself the subject of //Palm Sunday: An// //Autobiographical Collage// (1981). Kurt struggled with depression for years, he even attempted to take his own life in 1984. Even thought he faced challeges personally, Vonnegut became a literary icon. He counted writers such as Joseph Heller, another WWII veteran as his friend. Kurt died on April 12, 2007, at the age of 84 as a result of a head injuries caused in a fall at his home in New York a few weeks earlier. =====

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__Slaughterhouse- Five__ is about a man named Billy Pilgrim who is born in 1922 and grows up in llium, New York. He does fairly well in highschool. He decides to attend night classes at the School of Optometry, and he then gets drafted into the army during World War II. He trains for awhile with as a chaplain's assistant in South Carolina. His father dies in a hunting accident before Billy is shipped overseas to join a regiment in Luxembourg. Billy is then thrown into the Battle of the Bulge in Belguim, and he is then immediately taken prisoner of the Germans. Right before he is captured he begins to experience time traveling, he sees his life from the beginnning to the end. After he's captured, he is then transported in a railway boxcar to a camp in Germany. While in captivity he gets a shot of morphine that sends him time traveling again. He is then transported to the city of Dresden, which was still untouched by the wartime destruction. There the prisoners worked in a former slaughterhouse and manufacturesd malt syrup. One night something happens to the city of Dresden, and Billy survives. Billy says,"There are no characters in this story and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now" (Vonnegut 164). He is then able to leave because the Russians take over. He goes back to IIium to finish optometry school. Then he gets engaged to Valencia Merble, but then later commits himself to a veterans hospital to recieve shock treatments. He also gets captured by aliens. "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" (Vonnegut 211)and then travels back and he learns his fate at the end of his life that makes him want to travel back to a previous time in his life because hes seen it many times.=====


 * Billy Pilgrim
 * Bernhard V. O'Hare
 * Mary O'Hare
 * Bernhard V. O'Hare
 * Roland Weary
 * Wild Bob
 * Paul Lazzaro
 * Edgar Derby
 * Valencia Merble
 * Tralfamadorians
 * Eliot Rosewater
 * Kilgore Trout
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Werner Gluck
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Montana Wildhack
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Barbara Pilgrim
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Bertram Copeland Rumfoord
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Lily Rumfoord
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Robert Pilgrim
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Billy's mother
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Billy's father

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<span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">  In the book there were many things that worked well and many things that didn't work very well. Here are some of the things that I worked well and didn't work well. =====

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<span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">  In the story Billy is a character that is in the war and that makes it really interesting how the author of the book was involved with it. He used some of his own experiences in his book. Another thing that worked well was that once the book got going you undertood all of the things that were happening when he went back and forward in his life. =====

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<span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">  There were things in the story that were confusing to the reader. One of those things is when Billy traveled in time all the time. This was hard to follow and it always was changing and was hard to rember where he had already been before and what would happen next, because of what he had learned what would happen. Another thing that didn't work is that the author like to drag on about something and then sometimes he would repeat it over again. This makes it confusing when he does that because you have to infer why it is so important. =====

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 * __Point of view__-** The author narrates in both first and third person. The first-person sections are found mainly in the first and last chapters. The narrator mainly follows Billy Pilgrim but also presents the point of view of other characters whom Billy encounters.=====

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 * __Why This Book is So Outstanding__** The book __Slaughterhouse-Five__ was placed on the "Outstanding Books for the College Bound" for a few main reasons. First of all this book is unique itself, it is unlike most books, it is about someone who struggles with war and also is seeing the future of their life and trying to figure out what his life is about and if the war is what affected it in the future. The book targets a large audience, even though it involves subjects of a war. It is not just a story about a man, it has the making of the authors life inside the story. Vonegut is actually one of the side characters that is a prisoner, because he wanted to be apart of the book because he had experienced being captured and being a prisoner of war himself. It is also really cool and interesting because there is the aspects of aliens and traveling in time all tied into the book which make the story more complex and helps the readers feel what the person is going through in their life.======

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The book itself is Outstanding because the plot of the story is so interesting and put together fairly well so that the readers can visualize what the author was intending to understand about the story. One of the main reasons that they book comes across as outstanding is the character choice. Billy Pilgrim is a really good character that is trying to face the struggles of the war and to figure out why his future happens the way that it does and he even goes back and forth to find out what that action does to the rest of his life and even finds out what happens at the end of his life which makes him want to go back in time to live his life out. He learns,"And even if the wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death" (Vonnegut 4). The way the whole stroy comes together is amazing. Its so unique that for that reason it can be said to be outstanding.======

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__**Recommendation**__ I would recommend Slaughterhouse-Five to people who are interested in books that have a lot of things to follow and understand. In the book a lot of thins happen and repeat and if you don't remember it will be confusing. Also if you like the thought of traveling through your life from the beginning to the end, or the idea of being captured by aliens, this book might interest you. It also combines those two elements into the war in Dresden, Germany which is what the book is mainly about and how it affected his life and the struggle and the bad things that come out from war.======