Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war novel. War is presented as a violent, hellish inevitability which taints everyone involved. The bombing of the city of Dresden in Germany and frequent references to other events in World War II portray the horrific nature of the conflict. The motivations, the military details, and the political background of the war are not explored. Instead, the novel examines the horrific way in which war corrupts every person. Billy Pilgrim is an innocent, passive man. He is thrown into the meat grinder of the war and emerges on the other side as a traumatized, forever-changed person. He is forced to watch people die, starve, and suffer at the hands of his own countrymen. Billy is caught in the midst of the firebombing of Dresden, and he witnesses a pleasant German town filled with civilians turned into a desolate wasteland filled with corpses buried under mountains of ash. While the scale of the atrocities committed by the Axis during the war is incomparable to the violence carried out by the Allied troops, Vonnegut’s portrayal of Dresden shows that the U.S. and British forces were also capable of acts of indiscriminate death and destruction. Many scholars even characterize the Dresden bombing as a war crime.