Comparing Slaughterhouse-Five And Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut places his own life experiences In Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, in order to make the novels, which are frequently deemed ludicrous, more realistic and to answer problematic queries that have risen up in his past. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut‘s experience in World War II, a prisoner of war forced to witness the Allied forces’ firebombing of Dresden, is the essence of the novel, while Vonnegut’s great distaste for war and his mother’s suicide are greatly personified in Cat’s Cradle. Both of Vonnegut’s novels reflect historical and experiential elements of his own life.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, snap-shots of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s life are depicted. Billy is taken on a journey through different time periods …show more content…
Up until this novel, Vonnegut unsuccessfully attempted to describe in simple terms what happened that day and to attach to it plausible reason. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut discovers a way to successfully deal with the death and suffering he witnessed by shifting his perspective from that of human beings to that of god, or in this case, the Tralfamadoreans, which are toilet plunger shaped aliens who kidnap Billy in order to, among other things, explain their concept of time to him. We see the transformation of perspective when Billy Pilgrim finds himself in the Tralfamadorean zoo. Billy asks “why me?” The answer he receives is puzzling: “That is a very Earthling to ask Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why anything? Because this moment simply is…”ii The Tralfamadorean perspective is very similar to that of god; the Tralfamadoreans speak to him as though from a higher power and with immeasurable knowledge. Vonnegut uses this change in perspective along with the Tralfamadoreans’ sense of time to explain the mass sufferings of innocent civilians as he witnessed during the bombing. For the Tralfamadorians, time exists simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When someone dies, that person is simply dead at a particular time. Somewhere else and at a different time he or she is alive and well. The Tralfamadorians prefer to look at life’s nicer moments. It is the combination of Vonnegut’s change in perspective and his new …show more content…
The theme of suicide is found frequently in all of Vonnegut’s works, not just Cat’s Cradle. However, suicide plays a large role in this specific novel. After the freezing of all the earth’s water, many of the inhabitants of San Lorenzo decide to kill themselves by drinking some of the leftover ice-nine. They would rather kill themselves rather than live in a world that harbors such destruction. Even John’s newlywed wife kills herself because her religion, called Bokononism, preaches love and lust. Before the ice-nine incident, John’s wife yearned for love and would perform strange Bokononist rituals that are intended to create love between to individuals. When John gets angry at her for preforming these rituals with other men, she states that she means nothing by it but was simply attempting to find love. The residents of the island, who all believe in Bokononism, prefer to die then live in a world filled with hate. Vonnegut discusses suicide in the novel to understand why his own mother killed herself. He is saying that his mother could simply not stand the hatred and violence that was found during world war two, and therefore she decided to commit suicide. Vonnegut, as usual, ties his history with his novel in order to better understand his