Sh5

    The purpose of Slaughterhouse five: to discourage people from glorifying war. War in media is often glorified to the point that it almost turns into fantasy. Kurt Vonnegut wants people to understand what war is really like. War is pointless, most of the time you end up exactly where you started. Like in the Korean war, the starting point was the same as the end point.

    Multiple times in the story someone said something that was supposed to be taken lightly but you could see the real message. Billy was in Dresden when it got firebombed, so to escape he went to when he had a conversation with his daughter.

"It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die. So it goes. Billy dozed in the meat locker. He found himself engaged again, word for word, gesture for gesture, in the argument with his daughter with which this tale began. 'Father,' she said, ... 'You know who I could just kill?' she asked. 'Who could you kill?' Billy said." (pg. 165).

    Billy's daughter is making a joke of death when thousands and thousands of people die during a war. Death is not a joke, it is even less of a joke when your talking about war. Everybody dies, we know that. But to die over something pointless like getting shot over stealing a teapot is just ludicrous. It doesn't even make sense, why should thousands of people die for something their leaders did?
    Kurt Vonnegut makes sure that you know by the end of the book how pointless war is. Do you think war is pointless? What do you think the purpose of Slaughterhouse five is?