Slaughter House-Five as an American Novl

Slaughter House-Five as an American Novl

Slaughter House - Five as an American Novel

Slaughterhouse - Five by Kurt Vonnegut is clearly an American novel. Vonnegut
wrote this novel in an attempt to show Americans how they make mistakes as humans,
and to do this, he had to link them to the book somehow. He accomplished this by
including different aspects of American life, such as the family, the material possessions
of Americans, and items that are purely American. By doing this, Vonnegut ensures that
the people reading the book will be drawn in an able to identify with it. The images and
symbols Vonnegut uses easily distinguish Slaughterhouse - Five as an American novel.
Billy Pilgrim, the main character of the novel, is where most of the family is
focused. Billy has two children, one boy and one girl, and he also has a dog, named Spot.
This is a perfect representation of the American family. Vonnegut, describes this perfect
American family in the lines,
Billy became rich. He had two children, Barbara and Robert. In time, his
daughter Barbara married another optometrist, and Billy set him up in
business. Billy’s son Robert had a lot of trouble in high school, but then he
joined the famous Green Berets. He straightened out, became a fine young
man, and fought in Vietnam(24-25).
Billy’s son went off to fight for the country and his daughter married a man in the same
business as her father. This view of the American family is what everyone strives for, but
rarely captures.
The materialism displayed by the American family is also stressed by Vonnegut.
He tries to show that the characters in the novel are very materialistic. This materialism
is, sadly, a definite sign of Americanism. America was established with the idea that
anyone could come here and ‘make it’, but rules quickly became established about what
it really meant to ‘make it’. The stories of ‘rags to riches’ have come to represent what
America is. Vonnegut tells us in this novel that we have moved away from what is...