by Andrew Hawkins

Created on: June 14, 2010   Last Updated: June 15, 2010

Vonnegurt’s Cake

            Have you ever baked a cake before?  I mean from scratch putting all the simple ingredients into a masterpiece of its own. You must proud if you are able to express yourself through your baking creation. Now you must present the cake to your contemporaries to get their assured approval, but they do not see inside the cake you have just baked because it is covered in a thick, vanilla icing. Human nature and our curiosity forces us to dip our fingers into it and enjoy its sweet exterior but we have not dived into the center where the moist cake is hidden. There could be any sort of flavor cake but no one knows until they cut into it, essentially dissecting it to find its secrets. Slaughterhouse 5, one of the greatest literary works of the modern period must be cut into in the same sort of fashion. Any reader who takes it upon themselves to truly understand Vonnegut must come armed with a knife. However, not any type of knife, you need a cake knife so you can cut through all of the humorous ranting that like icing cover up the true meaning of the book which lies hidden in the cake. These inner deep emotions that Vonnegut expresses through his book is what makes this book a classic and also why it has been continuously dissected by literary critics because of its intriguing nature that allows each reader to develop his own conclusions and perspective about the book. To put this all in context, we must look into Vonnegut’s past, dissect his offset quirky rantings and finally ask ourselves, what does this truly mean?

WWII was the most destructive and brutal war ever fought by humankind against itself (who else could we fight, the Tramalfadorians?), and Kurt Vonnegut was one of the many men who fought for our country in this conflict. He was a private in the 106th Infantry division where he served as a scout, and during the Rhineland Campaign, he along with five other scouts was cut off from Allied forces (Farber). For several days, the scouts ventured behind enemy lines until they were caught by German troops on December 14, 1944 (Farber). The Nazi’s then took Vonnegut to Dresden where they were imprisoned in a slaughterhouse meat facility called Schlachthof Funf, known to the American POW’s as Slaughterhouse 5. During the firebombing of Dresden, an open city in February 1945, Vonnegut along with the other POW survived the bombing by getting into an underground

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