Viraj Ayar
20/12/2012

Analytical Piece

I believe that my tangent perfectly fits into Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse 5. Just like Vonnegut, my tangent contains elements of death, gruesome imagery that may be disturbing to the mind, and certain wordings/phrases that reflect the author’s style (So it goes). The base of this tangent is the element of death. The entire story of Slaughterhouse 5 revolves around the theme of death. For example, Vonnegut says, “...there [will] always still be plain old death”. He describes that in the end, humanity will always die. My tangent reflects the theme of death by talking about the number of fallen soldiers who lost their live. More importantly, the actual figure of Death is ever present in the end as he gives mercy to the tortured soldier. I find it appropriate to include Death as a person since he claims many lives in this novel. Next, my tangent fits Vonnegut’s book because its gruesome imagery is like Vonnegut’s himself. Vonnegut often goes into detail describing acts of violence and sex. For example, in this passage, Roland Weary vividly describes methods of execution, “You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert-see? He’s facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut of his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun til he dies.” In the tangent, the suffering of the soldier is similarly written to passages like this as it also does a good job of disturbing the reader with details like the