Slaughterhouse Five Rhetorical Analysis

Rhetorical Devices

As Edwin Starr’s famous anti-war song goes, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!” and if Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five had a theme song, this would be the perfect song. Slaughterhouse Five is one of the greatest anti-war books of all time- it even says so on the back cover. In order to convey his anti-war attitude to the readers, Vonnegut uses many different rhetorical devices in Slaughterhouse Five, including analogy, irony, and satire. The first important rhetorical device Vonnegut uses to convey his anti war attitude is analogy. The most blatant example of his anti war attitude in an analogy is when Vonnegut is speaking with moviemaker Harrison Star. Vonnegut explains that he is writing a book about
By including this quote by Harrison Star in the first chapter, Vonnegut shows that he is aware of, and accepts, the fact that war will never be abolished. Vonnegut realizes that writing an anti-war book is futile in actually stopping wars, yet he continues to write an entire novel with a main theme of anti-war in order to be different from the rest of society, and show that he will not be passive about the wars going on around him. Another example of an analogy that conveys the anti-war attitude comes in Chapter Three, when the German soldiers are taking Billy and
Vonnegut is one of the most famous satirical writers of modern day so when he uses satire to convey his anti-war attitude, it is no surprise. In Chapter Eight, Vonnegut discusses a book about a robot who has bad breath, “Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.” [213] Although the robot did horrible things like dropping jellied gasoline on people, no one had a problem with him. It was because he had bad breath that they did not like him. Vonnegut is making fun of society’s submission toward war and their utter acceptance of the fact that mindless slaughter is going on all around them and they do nothing but accept it. Again in Chapter Three, Vonnegut explains the process in which the Germans took their prisoners of war, “The Germans and the dog were engaged in a military operation which had an amusingly self-explanatory name, a human enterprise which is seldom described in detail, whose name alone, when reported as news or history, gives many war enthusiasts a sort of post-coital satisfaction. It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called ‘mopping up.’” [66] Vonnegut uses sexual imagery in order