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    A Study Guide for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
    A Study Guide for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
    A Study Guide for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
    Ebook39 pages36 minutes

    A Study Guide for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 21, 2015
    ISBN9781535833318
    A Study Guide for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

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      A Study Guide for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five - Gale

      4

      Slaughterhouse-Five

      Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

      1969

      Introduction

      In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was not especially well known or commercially successful, despite having already published five novels and two short story collections. The publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in that year marked Vonnegut's artistic and commercial breakthrough. Based on Vonnegut's own experiences as a World War II prisoner who witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, Slaughterhouse-Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has come unstuck in time. Without any forewarning, he finds himself suddenly transported to other points in time in his own past or future. In chronicling the extraordinary events that happen to Billy, from witnessing the Dresden firebombing to being kidnapped by aliens, Slaughterhouse-Five summarizes many of the themes of Vonnegut's work. These include the dangers of unchecked technology, the limitations of human action in a seemingly random and meaningless universe, and the need for people, adrift in an indifferent world, to treat one another with kindness and decency. Almost thirty years after its initial publication, Slaughterhouse-Five remains Vonnegut's most discussed and widely admired novel.

      Author Biography

      Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Kurt and Edith (Lieber) Vonnegut. Vonnegut's father was a successful architect, and his mother's family ran an equally successful brewery. However, the onset of Prohibition, followed by the Great Depression, as well as anti-German sentiment in the wake of World War I, put the Vonnegut family under severe economic and social distress. As an undergraduate at Cornell, Vonnegut wrote articles for the school newspaper opposing American entry into World War II. After Pearl Harbor, however, Vonnegut put aside his reservations about the war and joined the U.S. Army in January, 1943. World War II saw his family's fortunes sink even lower, leading to his mother's suicide in May, 1944. Vonnegut was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. In February, 1945, while in a German prison camp, he witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden, an experience which later became an important part of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

      After being liberated by Soviet troops in April, 1945, Vonnegut returned to the United States and was awarded the Purple Heart. He married Jane Cox in September of that year and enrolled in the graduate program in anthropology at the University of Chicago. His master's thesis was rejected, however, and in 1947 Vonnegut moved to Schenectady, New York, where he went to work

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