Slaughterhouse-Five- Opinion #2/ Tone

"A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad." (pg. 5)

This quote from early on in the novel is a perfect example of why I like this book. It's straight-forward, grim but sickeningly captivating, and easy to understand. As opposed to other works that practically write in another language, this novel is actually believable. The tone is one of the best parts about this novel. The author's participation in the military gives him an obvious bias but he makes his point clearly: war is massacre. The tone, therefor, comes from his negative personal experiences and his opinions on how to avoid future ones. The tone is also laced with dark humor and a bit of irony to the point where it's hard to tell which it is. For example, the author tells this story, a gruesome one at that, as a fictional one he will put in his book. Since it's so specific, I'm not sure if it was a story of his life or about one of his friends or simply false. Any way you slice it, Vonnegut's blunt, sarcastic, and eerie tone makes for a grim but believable and intriguing story.