Slaughterhouse-Five Prompt 1 “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell” – William T. Sherman. In the novel, Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut displays the impact that war can have on a person through descriptive language and flashbacks such as Billy’s time spent wandering behind German lines. Vonnegut, through Billy, shows how past events can have a huge negative effect not only on the individual but also on society as a whole. The impacts of war can affect someone individually, and it can affect society as a whole. Vonnegut shows how war can affect someone individually…show more content… So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy believed, because they could not see as well as his little green friends on Tralfamadore” (Vonnegut 29). During Billy’s time wandering behind German lines, he believes that he became “unstuck in time” and aliens came to him to tell him about all the secrets of life. Vonnegut describes the trauma and the horrific things that soldiers see to show why or how Billy became “unstuck in time.” Billy demonstrates the impact that war can have on a person because after all of the horrible things he had seen and the amount of time spent wandering in a foreign land, he goes insane. We see many times throughout the novel how war not only affects the individual but also how it can invoke societal change through the absolute and total destruction of society itself. Vonnegut describes this destruction during the war when he explains everything that Billy saw, “American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames” (Vonnegut
