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Slaughterhouse Five
''Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death'' is a 1969 semi-autobiographic science fiction-infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. It follows the life and experiences of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years, to his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during World War II, to the post-war years, with Billy occasionally traveling through time. The text centers on Billy's capture by the German Army and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, an experience which Vonnegut himself lived through as an American serviceman. The work has been called an example of "unmatched moral clarity"Powers, Kevin"The Moral Clarity of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ at 50" The New York Times, March 23, 2019, ''Sunday Book Review'', p. 13. and "one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time". Plot The story is told in a non-linear order by an unreliable narrator (he begins the novel by telling the reader, "All of this happe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the US Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He adopted his nephews after his siste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flashback (narrative)
A flashback (sometimes called an analepsis) is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory. In the opposite direction, a flashforward (or prolepsis) reveals events that will occur in the future. Both flashback and flashforward are used to cohere a story, develop a character, or add structure to the narrative. In literature, internal analepsis is a flashback to an earlier point in the narrative; external analepsis is a flashback to a time before the narrative started. In film, flashbacks depict the subjective experience of a character by showing a memory of a previous event and they are often used to "resolve an enigma". Flashbacks are important in film noir and melodrama films. In films and television, several camera techniques, editing approaches and special effects have evolved to alert the v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Battle Of The Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive (military), offensive military campaign, campaign on the Western Front (World War II), Western Front during World War II. The battle lasted from 16 December 1944 to 28 January 1945, towards the end of the war in Europe. It was launched through the densely forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg. The primary military objectives were to deny further use of the Belgian port of Antwerp to the Allies and to split the Allied lines, which potentially could have allowed the Germans to encirclement, encircle and destroy the four Allied forces. Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who since December 1941 had assumed direct command of the German army, believed that achieving these objectives would compel the Western Allies to accept a peace treaty in the Axis powers' favor. By this time, it was palpable to virtually the entire German leadership including Hitler himself that they had ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luxembourg
Luxembourg ( ; lb, Lëtzebuerg ; french: link=no, Luxembourg; german: link=no, Luxemburg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ; french: link=no, Grand-Duché de Luxembourg ; german: link=no, Großherzogtum Luxemburg is a small landlocked country in Western Europe. It borders Belgium to the west and north, Germany to the east, and France to the south. Its capital and most populous city, Luxembourg, is one of the four institutional seats of the European Union (together with Brussels, Frankfurt, and Strasbourg) and the seat of several EU institutions, notably the Court of Justice of the European Union, the highest judicial authority. Luxembourg's culture, people, and languages are highly intertwined with its French and German neighbors; while Luxembourgish is legally the only national language of the Luxembourgish people, French and German are also used in administrative and judicial matters and all three are considered administrative languages of the cou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South Carolina
)''Animis opibusque parati'' ( for, , Latin, Prepared in mind and resources, links=no) , anthem = " Carolina";" South Carolina On My Mind" , Former = Province of South Carolina , seat = Columbia , LargestCity = Charleston , LargestMetro = Greenville (combined and metro) Columbia (urban) , BorderingStates = Georgia, North Carolina , OfficialLang = English , population_demonym = South Carolinian , Governor = , Lieutenant Governor = , Legislature = General Assembly , Upperhouse = Senate , Lowerhouse = House of Representatives , Judiciary = South Carolina Supreme Court , Senators = , Representative = 6 Republicans1 Democrat , postal_code = SC , TradAbbreviation = S.C. , area_rank = 40th , area_total_sq_mi = 32,020 , area_total_km2 = 82,932 , area_land_sq_mi = 30,109 , area_land_km2 = 77,982 , area_water_sq_mi = 1,911 , area_water_km2 = 4,949 , area_water_percent = 6 , population_rank = 23rd , population_as_of = 2022 , 2010Pop = 5282634 , population ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fatalism
Fatalism is a family of related philosophical doctrines that stress the subjugation of all events or actions to fate or destiny, and is commonly associated with the consequent attitude of resignation in the face of future events which are thought to be inevitable. Definition The term "fatalism" can refer to any of the following ideas: * Any view according to which human beings are powerless to do anything other than what they actually do. Included in this is the belief that humans have no power to influence the future or indeed the outcome of their own actions. * The belief that events are decided by fate and are outside human control. * One such view is theological fatalism, according to which free will is incompatible with the existence of an omniscience, omniscient God who has foreknowledge of all future events. This is very similar to theological determinism. * A second such view is logical fatalism, according to which propositions about the future which we take to current ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Army
The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, clause 1 of the United States Constitution (1789). See alsTitle 10, Subtitle B, Chapter 301, Section 3001 The oldest and most senior branch of the U.S. military in order of precedence, the modern U.S. Army has its roots in the Continental Army, which was formed 14 June 1775 to fight the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783)—before the United States was established as a country. After the Revolutionary War, the Congress of the Confederation created the United States Army on 3 June 1784 to replace the disbanded Continental Army.Library of CongressJournals of the Continental Congress, Volume 27/ref> The United States Army considers itself to be a continuation of the Continental Army, and thus considers its institutional inception to be th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tralfamadore
Tralfamadore is the name of several fictional planets in the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Details of the corresponding indigenous alien race, the Tralfamadorians, vary from novel to novel: * In the 1959 novel ''The Sirens of Titan'', Tralfamadore is a planet in the Small Magellanic Cloud and the home of a civilization of machines, which dispatches Salo to a distant galaxy with a message for its inhabitants. After a part in his ship breaks, however, Salo is forced to land on Titan, a moon of Saturn, where he befriends Winston Niles Rumfoord. Rumfoord exists in much the same way as the Tralfamadorians of ''Slaughterhouse-Five'', while Salo appears to move in a linear fashion. The translation of Tralfamadore is given by Salo as both ''all of us'' and ''the number 541''. The Tralfamadorians were originally developed by super-beings who built them to allow themselves to search for a meaning to their lives. Unable to achieve this task, they eventually asked the machines to do it for them, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ilium, New York
Ilium is a fictional town in eastern New York state, used as a setting for many of Kurt Vonnegut's novels and stories, including ''Player Piano'', ''Cat's Cradle'', ''Slaughterhouse-Five'', and the stories "Deer in the Works", " Poor Little Rich Town", and "Ed Luby's Key Club". The town is dominated by its major industry leader, the Ilium Works, which produces scientific marvels to assist, or possibly harm, human life. The Ilium Works is Vonnegut's symbol for the "impersonal corporate giant" with the power to alter humankind's destiny. The town has been compared to Zenith, the fictional setting in Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel ''Babbitt''. In one sense, the name may refer to Troy, New York because "''Ilium''" was the name the Romans gave to ancient Troy, although Troy is mentioned as a separate city in ''Player Piano''. In many other respects, Ilium closely resembles Schenectady, New York, with the fictional Iroquois River standing in for the real Mohawk River, which flows west–ea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. Comprising the westernmost peninsulas of Eurasia, it shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with both Africa and Asia. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and Asia to the east. Europe is commonly considered to be Boundaries between the continents of Earth#Asia and Europe, separated from Asia by the drainage divide, watershed of the Ural Mountains, the Ural (river), Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Greater Caucasus, the Black Sea and the waterways of the Turkish Straits. "Europe" (pp. 68–69); "Asia" (pp. 90–91): "A commonly accepted division between Asia and E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict was based around the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by these two superpowers, following their temporary alliance and victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. Aside from the nuclear arsenal development and conventional military deployment, the struggle for dominance was expressed via indirect means such as psychological warfare, propaganda campaigns, espionage, far-reaching embargoes, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race. The Western Bloc was led by the United States as well as a number of other First W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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