Analysis of Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five :: Slaughterhouse-Five Essays

Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five Section One- Introduction Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut Junior, was published in 1968 after twenty-three years of internal anguish. The novel was a "progressive work" after Vonnegut returned from World War II. Why did it take twenty-three years for Kurt Vonnegut to write this novel? The answer lies within the book and within the man himself. Kurt Vonnegut served in the Armed Forces during World War II and was captured during The Battle of the Bulge. He and a group of American Prisoners of War were taken to Dresden to take part in a prisoner work camp. Vonnegut and his fellow soldiers were housed in an underground facility when Dresden became history as the most loss of human life at one time. On the night of February 13, 1945, when the Americans were underground, Dresden was firebombed by the Allied Air Force. The entire city was annihilated while 135,000 people were killed. The number of casualties is greater than those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The bombing of Dresden, Germany is why it took Kurt Vonnegut so long to write this book. The human pain and suffering is still fresh in the mind of the author twenty-three years later. One can only imagine the intense emotional scarring that one would suffer after exiting an underground shelter with a dozen other men to find a city destroyed and its people dead, corpses laying all around. These feelings are what prompted Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse-Five as he did. The main character of this novel mirrors the author in many ways, but the striking similarity is their inability to deal with the events of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945. Section Two- Critical Commentaries Kurt Vonnegut's work is nothing new to critics, but Slaughterhouse-Five is considered to be his best work.