IB English Lit Paper 2

Point of view Slaughterhouse Five

First person peripheral narrator. The narrator is a character that periodically pops up throughout Billy's travels through Germany.

Point of view Running in the Family

First person narrator. The narrator is Michael Ondaatje himself as he recounts memories and retells stories.

Narrative structure Slaughterhouse Five

The narrative provides a detailed account of Billy's war experiences, but it skips around his entire life from his early childhood in the 1920's until his death.

Narrative structure Running in the Family

non-linear, fragmented structure to reflect the fluidity of memory and identity. Ondaatje blends genres and voices to reconstruct personal and cultural history without relying on chronological order.

Context Slaughterhouse Five

World War 2 & Bombing of Dresden

Context Running in the Family

Narrative perspective Slaughterhouse Five

The narrator offered his own opinions and inserted his own comments on events. This makes it more biased as to the readers feeling and interpreting like the narrator.

Narrative perspective Running in the Family

Methods of characterization Slaughterhouse Five

Direct characterization. O'Brien directly characterizes them as he sees them. Direct characterization used to provide background information.

Bird symbolism Slaughterhouse Five

-The bird who says "Poo-tee-weet?"

The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say about war. Birdsong rings out alone in the silence after a massacre. The bird sings outside of Billy's hospital window and again in the last line of the book, asking a question for which we have no answer, just as we have no answer for how such an atrocity as the firebombing could happen.

Color symbolism Slaughterhouse Five

-The colors blue and ivory

On various occasions in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy's bare feet are described as being blue and ivory, as when Billy writes a letter in his basement in the cold and when he waits for the flying saucer to kidnap him. These cold, corpse like hues suggest the fragility of the thin line between life and death, between worldly and otherworldly experience.

Motif "so it goes" Slaughterhouse Five

Follows every mention of death. The phrase reflects a kind of comfort in the Tralfamadorian idea that although the person may be dead in that moment they are still alive in all other moments which can coexist or be visited in over through time travel. The phrase also keeps a tally of death throughout the story to show that it is inevitable.

The presence of the narrator as a character motif Slaughterhouse Five

Vonnegut speaks of his own war experience throughout the chapters, which indicates that the fiction has an intimate connection with Vonnegut's life. Once the connection is established Vonnegut lets the story of Billy Pilgrim to take over. Vonnegut also inserts himself throughout the course of the action.These appearances anchor Billy's life to a larger reality and highlight his struggle to fit into the human world.

Destructiveness of war theme Slaughterhouse Five

Vonnegut, then, injects the science-fiction thread, including the Tralfamadorians, to indicate how greatly the war has disrupted Billy's existence. It seems that Billy may be hallucinating about his experiences with the Tralfamadorians as a way to escape a world destroyed by war—a world that he cannot understand. Fourth dimension.

Illusion of free will theme Slaughterhouse Five

Billy Pilgrim uses Tralfamadorians to explore idea of free will. Tralfamadorins believe that there is no such thing as free will and believe they are powerless when it comes to change and accept their fate for what it is.As Billy learns to accept the Tralfamadorian teachings, we see how his actions indicate the futility of free will. Even if Billy were to train hard, wear the proper uniform, and be a good soldier, he might still die like the others in Dresden who are much better soldiers than he.

Setting Slaughterhouse Five

The narrative thread of 1944-1945 concerns Billy's army service in Germany and briefly in Luxembourg, where he is captured after the Battle of the Bulge. Most of the rest of Billy's life takes place in Ilium, New York. He also travels to the planet Tralfamadore and lives there in a zoo.