The Irony of War

From my first insight into Slaughterhouse-Five and its author, Kurt Vonnegut, I can observe that the way it's written gives the author the ability to capture the reader's attention. On the first chapter, the author explains what drove him to write this book, like his experiences in WWII and his life once he got back to America.Vonnegut tries to show that he can write a book like no other, as he can write an anti-war book when writing one is like writing an anti-glacier book. More than just proving he can write well, as it is an anti-war book, he is proving war wrong. 


As you read chapter one, you can notice the constant use of irony. As mentioned before, he mentions that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book, pointless. Anyway, he continues to write about war, and according to the New York Times review on the back cover, "a great anti-war book." It is ironic that he is writing a book about something that seems ineffective, but as he does it, he can show he is a good writer. It is also ironic the people whom Vonnegut dedicates the book to. The first, Mary O'Hare, seems to oppose to him, and in the conversation they have in the first chapter, they don't seem to get along very well. Still, the author dedicates the book to her showing that enemies are not enemies in every way. The second person, Gerhard Müller, had been a prisoner of the Americans in WWII, while Vonnegut and his friend had been prisoners of the Germans. At the beginning of the chapter he writes about Müller, a taxi driver who became friends with him, also showing how wars can be wrong, as enemies were able to be friends. As the author comments on how he wrote the book, he says he wanted the climax of the book be when an American soldier gets executed because of taking a teapot that wasn't his, instead of it being when thousands of people die as the city, Dresden, burns. Again through irony, he shows that war can leave out important things while making a big deal out of relatively small events. In conclusion, on this chapter Vonnegut starts to develop his anti-war book with some autobiographical content, using irony to support it.