Slaughterhouse Five
An explication on Chapter One
Summary of Chapter One
Rhetorical Analysis of Vonnegut
Inferences and thoughts about "Slaughterhouse Five"
Throughout chapter one of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut uses vast amounts of specific details that don’t seem to be necessary, but could be subtle hints to futuristic events that could have a probable outcome. The relevance in most of the details does partake in the situation at hand; however, these details do not exactly fit, or just look as if they are vast amounts of excess. One can believe these hinted details can help predict what is to happen later in the book, for example: “…he was hoisted into the air and the floor of the car went down, dropped out from under him, and the top of the car squashed him” (11). One could ask if this is a display of an account of death that would relate to somewhere later in the book. This death is direct. It has no significance at that moment. It does not relate. Another example could be the parataxis phrasing of “He is short and I am tall. We were Mutt and Jeff in the war. We were captured together in the war...” (5). Through all these deaths portrayed, and the jumping through time, and the trailing off, and the “so it goes fragments”, the audience would most likely take away the argument that there will always be wars, and “even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death” (4).