In Vonnegut’s anti-war book, Slaughterhouse-Five, he has a character named Billy Pilgrim, who is a drafted American soldier during World War II. He goes through different parts of his life by time traveling and encounters with aliens along the way. The story revolves around the bombing of Dresden and how Billy interprets life as the way he sees it. From end to end in the book, Vonnegut uses plentiful of rhetorical techniques such as: metaphors, syntax, and diction to emphasize to the readers that the British are comically more “realistic” for war than the American POWs— in all actuality the Americans are mostly depicted the way it is in reality. The way Vonnegut intertwines metaphors, syntax, and diction to reiterate that the American POWs are not as well “prepared”, although the British are. Vonnegut uses syntax as he writes, “The Englishmen had hoarded these so cunningly that now, as the war was ending, they had three tons of sugar, one ton of coffee, eleven hundred pounds of chocolate, seven hundred pounds of tobacco…” He contrasts the British explicitly with the detailed list that they are rich of food and resources because the British have to share with the broke down Americans. …show more content…
In a metaphor, Vonnegut writes, “‘My God— what have they done to you, lad? This isn’t a man. It’s a broken kite.’” Vonnegut emphasizes greatly that Billy isn’t recognizable as an actual human, specifically not even as a man because of how worn and torn down he was during the war. His masculinity was insulted the most when the British could not depict that he was not a man, but as a broken kite. Vonnegut also writes, “The Englishmen were clean and enthusiastic and decent and strong.” There again he contrasts the Englishmen with detailed descriptions, but the Americans, specifically Billy was simply put just a broken