It would be agreed that a strong assertion concerning the impact of war on life can be made when analyzing Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five; The assertion being of course that it is nearly impossible to live a relatively normal life after participating in warfare.
There are several literary forms Vonnegut used in relation to the context of the story that support this claim, the most noted being his nonlinear writing style in relation to various references to Tralfamadorian literature. Traldamadorian narrative has no beginning, middle, or end, it is all simply there, easily seen like a photograph, never altering or changing times. Vonnegut writes his novel in a similar manner, arguably for this reason, so that a meaningful whole can be inferred from something as destructive, chaotic, and fragmented as the firebombing of Dresden. He argues in various parts of the novel that there is nothing meaningful to say about a massacre, that nothing should be said about a massacre. I believe this is the reason Vonnegut has constructed a Tralfamadorian novel, not to say anything about Dresden, but to display a picture of the disaster. This nonlinear form of narrative sequence can also assert Pilgrim’s PTSD tendencies in the novel, illustrating the effects war has on those after they return home.
