Topic > How War Leads to Destruction in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

“Peace is a path to happiness and the future. War is a road to destruction and death." - Belittling Mridha. It is known that conflict between different nations or states, demolishes one's nation, affects the development of the economy, takes the lives of innocent individuals. Billy Pilgrim as a soldier in World War II went through the war and experienced similar events which led to significantly affecting his entire life. In this novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Billy had no answers, he was shaken by this devastating event. Furthermore, the central theme will be the bombing of Dresden and how “war leads to destruction”. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In this book, Billy Pilgrim is shown traveling to the Dresden bombing, returning to his birthplace, and to the planet Tradlafamdor in an inconsistent order. First, the innocent community and residents of Dresden were harmed by the bombing. Billy claimed that Dresden resembled the surface of the moon, “Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everyone else in the neighborhood was dead." This was due to the destruction that the Allied forces had caused with the bomb and had caused the death of many unwanted and innocent human lives that should not have been killed. Furthermore, prisoners of war from many countries joined together to help in the excavation of corpses, as quoted “The first corpse mine in Dresden began.” Billy and other POWs helped clean up the remains of Dresden and more than 25,000 people who died there. Billy observes the sadism and cruelty of the orb once the city is bombed. To add more, the book said that “the bodies were liquefied and the smell was like mustard and rose gas”. This quote really makes me smell the real scene. Furthermore, Billy faces the Dresden attack with awareness and unhappiness rather than aggression and pain. Never in this novel was Billy seen to be in pain or aggressive with anything. Furthermore, “135,000 people died following an air attack with conventional weapons.” If hundreds of thousands of innocent people died, imagine how many people were injured during this horrible event, just like Billy, and how it was a significant event that has affected his life ever since. However, this ties into the theme of “War leads to destruction” because Dresden was left demolished, many innocent people lost their lives and left the city unavailable to recover, profoundly affecting their economy. One of the most popular lines in the book is "So it goes," uttered every time a biotic being dies. It makes him capable of forgiving anyone, and he never seems to get angry throughout the novel and appears accepting and profoundly passive. The quote “So it goes” was uttered by Tralfamadorians whenever they saw a corpse, they were described as “they were two feet tall, and green, and shaped like the plumber's friends”. For them, death is simply a disgusting condition at a specific moment in one's existence. Billy Pilgrim currently views death identically, I think this is because Billy learned from them when the aliens took him to Tralfamador to exhibit in a zoo. “I simply shrug my shoulders and say what the Tralfamadorians say about the dead, which is 'So it goes.'” This quote shows that Billy learned “So it goes” from the Tralfamadorians. This statement was mostly on every other page, popping up often. This shows that there were many murders and moments of destruction that connect,”.