Slaughterhouse Five By Kurt Vonnegut: A Literary Analysis

Despite the animated, child-friendly fairytales, Disney has a reputation for making films based on dark stories (Concession). For example, Disney’s 1950’s fairytale, Cinderella, is based off of the Brothers Grimm tale, Aschenputtel (Appositive). Instead of vigorously trying to fit their feet in Cinderella’s glass slipper, one of the evil stepsisters cuts off her toes, and the other her heel in attempt to fit the slipper. In hope to gain Cinderella’s good fortune as queen, the evil stepsisters are brutally pecked in the eyes by birds as a punishment for their immorality. Similar to the story of Cinderella and many movies based on books, director George Roy Hill’s movie strayed away from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut creatively
In both the movie and the book, the protagonist, Billy is constantly time traveling between past, present, and future. According to Kilgore Trout, a science fiction author in the novel, Billy’s ability to travel through time is a mirroring example explained in Trouts book, Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension (Concession). “It was about people whose (Wh-Structure) mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them” (Vonnegut 132). Therefore, Kilgore Trout was one of the influences on Billy’s strong belief in the Tralfamadorians. Vonnegut is able to create a time travel with specific, vibrant details of Billy’s experiences reliving different moments throughout his lifetime. What I enjoy the most was how apathetic Billy is exhibiting hardly any feelings or emotions towards being able to travel through time; he “…is spastic in time, he has no control over where (Wh-Structure) he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun” (Vonnegut 29). In both the novel and the film, Billy was only able to time travel in return to painful or familiar moments relating to a moment he was currently
Since the novel focused, quite frequently, on time, death, and free will as major themes, readers were given many opportunities to re-think their perspectives on life itself, for “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future” (Vonnegut 77). One lesson Billy learned from the Tralfamadorians was that there is no why (Wh-Structure). Every moment that has happened or will happen is set in stone by a higher power. Nobody could change their fate because life was already planned for them. Tralfamadorians explained free will to be an illusion of life. Free will had meant that people would have the ability to change their futures and create new plans for their lives, but Tralfamadorians believed that everyone’s life path had been already planned and there were no ways to change that. Therefore, readers focused more on the Tralfamadorian’s lessons rather than the war