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War Is Not Fair In Love Of War Analysis

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All is Not Fair in Love of War The novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut questions how war is perceived by mankind. Vonnegut in his first chapter describes the process of him deciding to use his experience of the Dresden Firebombing in World War II to be the main point of his dark satire. World War Two is one of many bloody conflicts and is certainly not going to be the last. It is ironic that there are so many regulations to the chaotic phenomenon of war because it is trying to give humanity to the destruction of human life. War is a time where we can justify the taking of another person’s everything. Vonnegut displays that humanity forgets the true nature of war by glorifying it as heroic, romanticising the thrill of battle, and …show more content…

Many grow up playing war or watching shows displaying how easy war is for the protagonist giving the impression that war is a game. What Billy Pilgrim the main character sees in Dresden is gruesome and ruins the thrill of war. The character Pilgrim describes that “There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn 't smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like mustard gas and roses”(pg.94). Pilgrim’s description is spine chilling because people are turned into meaningless heaps of their former humanity and must be disposed off like rocks in a mine. The soldiers who are on the ground or in the air at Dresden are forever scarred by the stench of burned flesh. Vonnegut constantly uses the phrase “mustard gas and roses” to describe the smell of war. The roses are the romantic views of war and the mustard gas is the deadly side. He repeats this phrase in order to describe how most war atrocities have the same smell of the soldiers’ hopes for war, but over time the stench of death will be all that is left after a day or two. Each soldier sees that their fight is the most important fight, but really in the eyes of time war is redundant. Vonnegut crushes the idea that every soldier 's’ actions will last the course of time by using the phrase “So it goes”(pgs.36,58,61). The phrase is used almost one hundred times in order to give the impression that most of war does not contribute anything new or helpful to humanity. Soldiers grow up with dreams that they will go on marvellous adventures or slay the wicked in order to be remembered, yet this is true for some not all. The Glory and romance of war are searched out by many, but many will be forgotten or die

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