A Life Worth Living in Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five :: Slaughterhouse-Five Essays

A Life Worth Living in Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut (1922- ) is an author with a uniqueperspective on life. He sees in a vivid technicolor things inthis earthly concern that the rest of humanity may only see in black andwhite. By the same token he sees life as a rather dark subject,its the ultimate joke at our expense (Lundquist 1). His lifeexperience has been one of hardship. His mother committed suicidein 1942. Two years later he was captured by Nazis in World WarIIs epic Battle of the Bulge. In 1943 he survived the massively ruinous fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. He returned withthe distinguished Purple Heart. In 1958 his sister andbrother-in-law died, leaving him to raise their children, alongwith his own (Campbell 2). Despite these hardships, however, toVonnegut life is still worth living. It shows through in hisnovels. Vonnegut utilizes black humor and irony to show manyrecurring themes noted in his works which are we, as a race, mustlearn to guard happy illusions over evil ones and that a soothinglie is sometimes the best truth (Lundquist 1). To say that Vonnegut feels life is worth living despitethe horrors of the world is to say that Vonnegut really longs forthe life of his childhood. It was a life of family and good,Midwestern upbringing. Wholesome morals like self-respect andpacifism were fed to him along with other staples of the Midwest. the States was an idealistic, pacifistic nation at the time. I was taught in the sixth grade to be proud that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity