Accounts of Two Survivors

The similarities between Kurt Vonnegut and Art Spiegelman's father are many: both took part in humanity's most destructive war, a world-changing event that defined history. Both fought on the battlefield, one as an American soldier and one as a Polish soldier. Both fought the Nazis. Both were then taken prisoner by the Nazis, which was physically and mentally brutal and intense.

When comparing the literary works, however, significant differences change the "weight" and context of the pieces. Maus is an incredibly powerful graphic representation of a story told from father to son, in what seems to be an organized and deliberate manner. The father is presenting his story in story format, with the intent of it being recorded.

Slaughterhouse-Five, on the other hand, is told directly by a man who went through the experience of the firebombing of Dresden. It's not told directly: it's expressed through a character of Billy Pilgrim, but this character is a direct mental construct of a survivor of the firebombing. Sometimes it's confusing to follow.

Maus is relatively far easier to follow, event-wise, but in some ways so much harder. Vonnegut was a soldier fighting other soldiers - he became a POW. Vladek was just a regular man. While initially he was a soldier and fought, after he left the initial POW camp his persecution came solely from his status as a Jew. He was just a citizen of a country with a family and business and marriage and children to think of and love. Yet a climate of hate and intolerance appeared around him, infiltrated every part of his life, and eventually tore it apart. I believe the story of Maus will strongly involve how this father has changed his son, and how the relationship between them functions. We can tell it's influenced him strongly. In the first encounter between father and son we see, the father scoffs at his son's use of the word friend: "If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week...then you could see what is friends!.."

Slaughter house Maus

        The similarities of this book comparing with slaughter house five is mainly on the outline of the story, like O’Brian or any other war story writers, stories were told here and there, there is no clear date or time that align event that happened. However, while I was reading Maus, it gives me a more clear understanding of what is going on with each event even stories were not in order; also, the narratives are more sensitive, there are more elements of emotions towards what happened, such as while Valdek was talking about he abandon his girlfriend and got engaged with Anja, and the way he explain himself when he heard Anja wanted to cancel the engagement. Comparing that with Slaughter house five, throughout the book in every single story, no matter where Billy is or what happened, Billy is either making of himself or others, the narrative gives me a strong sense of ignorance and hopeless. Although, I think there are a few reasons of why one is more logical and emotional, while the other one is not. First, with Maus, the story was told by his father, so the author digested the story, and made a clear understanding out of it before he started writing about it; on the other hand, Vonnegut was just putting down random l thoughts, and adding quotes to make his story more validated, that is why sometimes readers cannot fully keep up with the logical flow of his story. Second, I think the reason why Maus is more emotional, was because it was written by the person that the story was told, therefore, stories might be told with mixing of the author’s personal emotions when her heard the story, plus, the person who told the story was his own father, clearly unhealthy and has experienced through horrible tragedies. But with slaughter house five, everything was a just joke to Vonnegut.

Vonnegut vs. Spiegelman: What's the Same, What's Different

Vonnegut and Spiegelman are both fantastic writers in their own. Maus so far is interesting and I think it will get even better, but I really did like Vonnegut's style of writing. Spiegelman uses animation and cartoons to help get his image across and I like it because it is a nice change from the novel format of Slaughterhouse 5, however it does not leave as much up to the imagination as SH5 did. Spiegelman also has his story much more rigid than Vonnegut's. Even though this was a little bit confusing at sometimes I really like the loose feel of Vonnegut's novel because it doesn't focus on anything in particular for too long. That turned a lot of people off but I though it pulled you into the novel even more because of the way it made you pay attention to the time periods and who was telling the story. However Vladek is much more appealing to me than Billy Pilgrim was. I'm sure many people feel this way because Billy was not meant to be liked that much but still it is refreshing to have a main character that you actually support. I think it is interesting that Spiegelman uses the cat and mouse analogy for the Nazis and Jews in his book. It makes sense but i think it takes away from the brutality and realness from the actual terror that the Jews must have faced when confronted by Nazis. It makes it more childish and dulls the reality of the horrors that went on during the war. Vonnegut's novel was a bit grittier and I think that helps us understand the concept of war a lot more. Never the less I am looking forward to getting deeper into Maus and seeing what Spiegelman has to tell us about his vision of the war.

Vonnegut vs. Spiegelman

Both Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman reflect on experiences with war. The two pieces share various similarities and differences on their storytelling style. Both authors choose to play with time in their writing. Spiegelman writes his novel as a man reminiscing to his son, so naturally it jumps from the present to the past. Vonnegut also moves throughout time in his writing. Although playing with the idea of time is a similarity between the two books, they approach the task differently. Vonnegut’s jumping from one period of time to another without much warning to the reader. This can get confusing and it made it harder for me to read. Spiegelman’s writing is more coherent and flows more naturally. For this reason, I prefer Maus to Slaughterhouse Five. The two authors also seem to view war differently. In Vonnegut’s writing, he came off as passive and indifferent to the idea of war, even though he participated in it and wrote an entire book on his experience. Spiegelman makes his stance on the war very clear. He has a hateful attitude towards the Nazis, and shows this by going into detail about how he was treated as a prisoner of war. It is natural for the reader to side with the protagonist and hate the antagonist and with Slaughterhouse Five I wasn’t sure if I should hate the war or join in Vonnegut’s indifference. The two books also seem to share a sci-fi element in their writing. In Spiegelman’s graphic novel, the characters are mice, with the exception of pigs or cats. The cats are obviously drawn to represent the Nazi officers. Vonnegut discusses an alien obduction in his novel, and a race called the Tralfamadorians. I am interested to read more of Maus, especially since so far the war veteran in the story seems more put together and less psychologically scarred from battle as in Slaughterhouse Five, and I’m curious to see if this will change as we learn more about him. 

Maus and Slaughterhouse

Speigelman has a very different writing style compared to Kurt Vonnegut. For example, Vonnegut always jumped around in his book, Slaughterhouse Five, which made it harder for the reader to understand what was going on in the story. At least for me, while reading Slaughterhouse Five, I was really confused at certain points in the story and I even forgot that some of the events even happened. Vonnegut’s writing style was jumbled and all over the place and kind of messy. In Maus, it is a graphic novel that is full of pictures and being as young as we all are, I believe we all can relate to this book more just based off of visual aids. One similarity I did notice between the two is they both have stories about World War II. Vonnegut had the viewpoint of a silly soldier, if you want to even call him that. Billy Pilgrim seemed so weak and in my opinion, he was weaker than a civilian. Maus seems like it is going to be more interesting based off of what I have read so far. I like stories that seem to follow a chronological order because that is what I am used to. Reading Slaughterhouse Five was unique to me because I have never really read a book that jumped all over the place with sub stories in the main story. I prefer the main character Vladek in Maus than I do Billy Pilgrim because Vladek just seems like a guy that is straight up with you. Billy Pilgrim was just so strange and I could not really relate to him, despite my own weirdness. In this book that we are reading now, I hope we get to see the war from another perspective that does not seem to be as passive and neutral as we did with Kurt Vonnegut.

Speigelman and Vonnegut

The first similarity I found between Speigelman’s and Vonnegut’s story telling, is that they both started of there stories with the a character wanting to write a story about experiences dealing with the Second World War. The differences, besides Maus being a graphic novel, is that the Speigelman’s story telling is much more linear than Vonnegut’s there is a little jumping around but back and forth between Vladek and Art in the present to, when it’s just Vladek in the past. While Vonnegut’s story had no real chronological order to it at all (which I believe really helped get across the point of a possible mental disorder Billy may have suffered from). I am personally preferring Maus so far mainly because it is in a more set time line. I realize that the jumping around in Slaughterhouse Five was a very intentional and important aspect to the story, but it really made it a hard read for me. I also am liking the character of Vladek much more than the charecter of Billy Pilgrim. This is because Vladek is was a much easier character to relate with than Billy, Vladek was more of a everyday guy. He had a job with an apartment just trying to get by, going in between relationship, he’s actually active in his life. This is also shown when he first got into combat and killed a German soldier and stated “well at least I did something” compared to Billy who didn’t do anything, Billy was just way to passive for me to relate to. I have never met anyone that is or was as passive as Billy.  It made him almost feel fake to me, as if no person alive could possibly be that passive in life, which I suppose is what Vonnegut was going for. 

Battle for the crown: Vonnegut vs. Spiegelman

It is a lot harder to spot the differences between Vonnegut and Spiegelman’s styles of writing than what I originally thought it would be. Before I started reading the differences were already obvious, or so I thought. One was a novel and the other one was a comic book, done. Easy peasy. Then I started writing this blog and changed my mind completely. Even though Vonnegut has a very unique way of telling his story, he uses a stream-of-consciousness approach. In which events do not occur in a chronological order but rather flow into each other based on the narrator’s thoughts. Spiegelman uses a more traditional method of narration. They both make it sound more like a bedtime story as opposed to a biography like most stories about the war. Reading about the holocaust in the form of a graphic novel is a little bizarre because it is a very emotional and difficult subject. The way Spiegelman portrays the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, despite being very clever and ironic, makes it less serious. Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorians and time traveling in a similar fashion. I like Spiegelman’s narrative better for several reasons; one, because the Holocaust is taught and talked about all over the world I am much more familiar with the holocaust than the bombing of Dresden. This makes Spiegelman story more appealing and familiar in a way. Two, I am a visual person, so the illustration help me understand the story much better. Lastly, because Spiegelman’s story is in chronological order it makes it less confusing and more enjoyable to read because I don’t feel the need to re-read passages to see if I missed something, like I often did in Slaughterhouse 5.

Vonnegut and Speigelman

Vonnegut and Speigelman's story telling techniques have some similarities and some obvious differences. Vonnegut and Speigelman are both telling war stories and have flashbacks to the past, but Vonnegut's flashbacks are much more all over the place while Speigelman's flashbacks are more fluent and seem to have a chronological order. Vonnegut writes in a narrative way while Speigelman writes in a comic strip style. Unlike Vonnegut, Speigelman's story seems like a more believable, human story. It was hard to determine if Vonnegut's stories were real or imagined. It is also very interesting to that Speigelman's story is a graphic novel and seems very much like a comic strip. All Speigelman's characters are animals. This can represent Speigelman coping with the war. To make a war story into a comic seems like Speigelman is trying to stay distant from what actually happened in the war. Telling the story as a comic may be a way of coping with what happened in the war, using animals as characters makes the actually "war story" seem less serious and more comical than something that really happened. Even if it did happen, and Speigelman makes his story feel much more believable than Vonnegut's, a comic strip style is probably a way to make it feel less real and less serious than it actually is to Speigelman. Vonnegut also uses the phrase "So it goes" to cope with everything that happened to him in the war. Both of these authors have very weird, interesting ways of coping with war through their story telling. If I had to pick, I feel more drawn to Maus, just because it a graphic novel. I enjoy graphic novels and I love how creative it is so far. Using animals to represent real people is such a clever way to depict how a person can appear to you. Vonnegut's story telling was just a bit too back and forth to me, I was always confused. The graphic novel helped me keep track of what was going on because I got the chance to look at pictures while reading.

Speigelman and Vonnegut

The most notable difference between the two authors is that Manus is a graphic novel whereas Slaughterhouse Five was not. Speigelman has a somewhat lucid way of story telling. It is almost chronological (a first this happened...next this..way of story telling), despite the fact that real time conversations are injected in the story telling every now and then. Pictures always help to make clearer the story a person is trying to tell and so the pictures were helpful in this book. Speigelman's story seems very believable as opposed to Vonnegut's, which was questionable at many times. Vonnegut's story telling was all over the place, which I would say worked for him because sometimes you just need to get everything out even if you have to ramble on, or even if it is not clear. Vonnegut would write about some things more than others whereas Speigelman just tried to tell the full story without going back to certain incidents (so far in the book this is his method). I like Speigelman's way of story telling because while I know nothing in life is linear (including thinking), history telling is close to that and it's easier and more precise thus the reader does not have to make too many inference.

Spiegelman and Vonnegut

The story telling of Art Spiegelman in Maus shares a multitude of similarities and differences with the style of story telling Kurt Vonnegut uses in Slaughterhouse 5. One of the most glaring similarities between the authors is how they jump around in time while telling the story. Vonnegut does this to his main character, Billy Pilgrim by a time travel device given to him by space aliens while Spiegelman uses the father’s story telling in the present about the past to jump around in time. The biggest difference between the two is how they decided to write their stories.  Vonnegut chose to write a satirical science-fiction semi-autobiographical like novel while Spiegelman decided to write a graphic novel. Personally, I prefer Vonnegut to Spiegelman because I have a darker sense of humor. The way he uses the phrase “and so it goes”’ after describing something terrible is humorous to myself. In my opinion it’s his way of shrugging these horrid acts off as just something humans do. I find it humorously similar to how Kel from the 90’s television show Keenan and Kel ended every show with “awww it goes”. Another reason I enjoy Vonnegut’s work in Slaughterhouse 5 is how he deals with free will as well as illogicalness in human nature while we search for life’s meaning. I also liked how the book is an anti-war novel but he acknowledges in the beginning that writing an anti-war book is similar to writing an anti-glacier book because both are unstoppable. Spiegelman’s book is really a work as well but it is definitely more reality based. Vonnegut’s book is definitely tripper and out there which is another reason why I prefer Vonnegut to Spiegelman. In conclusion, Spiegelman and Vonnegut have many similarities and differences in their books but both are literary works of art.        

Connections Between Vonnegut & Spiegelman’s Writing

Vonnegut and Spiegelman possess quite a similar writing style that cannot be overlooked. One attribute I noticed while reading was how Vonnegut and Spiegelman applied metafiction in their work. As discussed in class, metafiction, in a nutshell, is a writing technique that draws attention to the work of art whilst still revealing the truth of the story. I believe Spiegelman does a great job in using metafiction. Throughout the graphic novel, Artie is trying to write the very book that we are reading. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut tells his readers in the beginning of how he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five. Thus, Vonnegut and Spiegelman used metafiction as a way to make their stories more real rather they did it intentionally or not.

Another similarity they possess in their writing is how unapologetic they are when it comes to their storytelling. In the very beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut loses a little credibility by stating that “all this happened, more or less.” In Spiegelman’s graphic novel, we see that Artie’s father sometimes has a difficulty time remembering which Spiegelman includes in his story which, thereby, also loses credibility because we don’t know if anything Artie’s father is saying is what really happened. They make no apologies for what they include or leave out of their story which brings a certain authenticity to their stories because it all centers on one character. Both books are about World War II and instead of dwelling on politics and facts, they focus primarily on one character. Slaughterhouse-Five focuses on Billy Pilgrim whereas Maus focuses on the life of Artie’s father, Vladek Spiegelman.

In addition, Spiegelman and Vonnegut both view death as just a phase of life and write it as such. Vonnegut mentions death in a casual, flippant  tone with the legendary phrase, “So it goes”. This phrase can easily be placed in Maus in some situations as well. For example, when Artie’s father mentioned his mother’s death. “ She was sick of cancer…and a month or two later she died.” (So it goes.) It appears that both authors possess the same idea of death and it shows through their work.

All in all, Spiegelman and Vonnegut have taken a horrific, tragic event, World War II, and altered it to encompass a story of life and loss intertwined. Maus focuses on a relationship between father and son whereas Slaughterhouse-Five focuses on the bombing of Dresden and Billy Pilgrim who is at war with himself.  Both Spiegelman and Vonnegut succeed in telling their stories with as much sincerity as they can muster. They share the same nonchalant tone and sardonic humor. Their narrative storytelling is candid and poignant. 

Maus

I find it’s funny that Spiegelman chose to portrait the Jews as mice and the Nazi Germans as cats. Cats are the predators while mice are the prey. That was the only relationship they had with each other. The Germans killed so many Jewish people in the Holocaust like they were nothing. Just like cats killing mice in people’s household. It could be seen as pest control by the Germans. The Nazis saw them as vermin who did nothing but caused all the troubles. I’m still pondering why Spiegelman chose to depict non-Jewish Poles as pigs. Depicting people of different ethnicities as different species is different from other novels. It is a troubling concept for many people to see but it is how many were judged throughout history, by the way they look not how they actually are as people.

It’s hard to tell Maus’ genre. It is a graphic novel but it could be a historical book, an autobiography, or a fiction. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five shares this with Maus. Other similarities are that they are both about WWII and the ‘present.’

Additionally, Maus shows a trouble relationship between Artie and Vladek. They don’t seem to get along very well. Vladek seems like the control type of person. Nothing can please him. He’s nick picking at everything Artie and his current wife, Mala, do. Maus also shows Artie’s fixation to his father. Mala was also a holocaust survivor but Artie barely talked to her and completely ignored her experiences. Artie only wanted to hear what his father had to say. I’m wondering why.

It’s also strange that most people think Vladek has PTSD. While it is reasonable to think that, some veterans don’t have that. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we don’t have to try to find things that’s representative of PTSD in the characters in books about wars.

Vonnegut and Spiegelman

Both Vonnegut and Spiegelman chose to cover their true meaning behind delicate hints and allusions. In my opinion, “Maus” and “Slaughterhouse Five” are not about proving a point. Instead, these books present the absolute of good and evil in a simple and brief way, so that we may be able to differentiate all of the many gradients that lie among the stories. Although both stories are about war veterans and how the main characters of both stories relives their war memories over and over again, the writing style of both the authors are quite different. I found Spiegelmen’s writing much easier to understand, because it is a graphic novel and also the events are very clear and well stated and also it is very much more chronologically on the limelight than Vonnegut’s writing. Vonnegut’s way of describing Billy Pilgrim’s relieving memories is so scattered around that it is very difficult to understand when he time travels, when he is abducted by the aliens, and when he is actually in his present. Billy Pilgrim’s story is a chronological failure as well as the fact that his body and mind are always in separate place living separate events. On the other hand, Spiegelman described the story with clarity where Vladek shares his war memories with his son and is much more easier to understand as it is a conversational setting and plus it being a graphic novel makes it much more fun to see each character’s expressions on their specific dialogues. It is interesting that to me that we cannot ultimately say that either “Maus” or “Slaughterhouse Five” was planned to be an anti-war book. As all the events in the stories are described to be so emotional and so much more meaningful, that it occurs to me about O’Brien’s saying about how wars are never moral and if they are then it is never true.

Vonnegut vs. Spiegelman

Both Vonnegut and Spiegelman use a non-consecutive narrative to tell their stories. Both start with the beginning of the process of the writing, which is to say when the author is still in the early stages of the creative process. Vonnegut begins with him meeting the people he met in the war to discuss how he should write his book and Spiegelman’s begins with him meeting his father to hear the father’s story about the war.

Another similarity is the narrative continuously jumping from the past to the present and back again. Vonnegut of course would have his story return to many different “presents” as well as many different “pasts” by way of his time travel device. Speigelman on the other hand has a much more organized style. The son and father occupy the present and the time of the story the father relates serves as the past.

There is also a similar manner in the two works in that the styles are very unconventional. Vonnegut uses his time travel and alien abductions and Spiegelman makes all of the people in his book, to include himself, an animal of some kind. Jews are portrayed as mice, Poles are pigs, and Germans appear to be cats.

A difference is the plausibility of the narrative. Vonnegut wrote in a manner that made it difficult to determine whether or not what was real and what was imagined. Spiegelman on the other hand tells a very human story that is entirely believable.

While Vonnegut seems to be using analogies to express what he wanted to say regarding the war, Spiegelman takes a much more direct approach. Spiegelman’s story is very much like an oral history. His plot is that of one generation passing their stories down to the next orally. Vonnegut never really reveals to whom he is writing, we are just left to follow along in the timeline.

               

Back (and Forth) in Time

Ever since I picked up Maus by Art Spiegelman, I have not been able to put it down. It is such a captivating novel whose graphic novel nature, I think, is the reason it's so captivating. Like Billy in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vladek (Art's father) has some trouble retelling his story. Unlike Billy, whose storyline is constantly interrupted by jagged time-travel and his musings with alien abduction and the idea of free will, Vladek has mostly full control over his memory. There are some spots that his son must remind him that he has skipped, but that can be expected from an elderly man. There are hints of PTSD in Vladek's story, he gets very emotional at some parts of his story thus far, but not to the extent of Billy in Slaughterhouse-Five. Even when it jumps from the past back to the present, the graphic novel aspect of Maus makes this sudden shift in time easy to follow. You see Vladek, probably on his stationary bike, and Art either on the floor or in a chair busy writing down Vladek's words or asking questions about the story. The shift in scenery from the 1930s/40s to the present day make Vladek's story (and interruptions) easy to follow. Though I enjoy both novels, I am greatly partial to Maus.  It is a much more personal story than Billy's. When Vladek is telling his story, I feel like I'm listening to my own grandfather tell me about the war. It's not like Billy's story where he's simply telling you the "facts" of what has happened to him during and after the war. Billy's story can be simply stated as, in Billy's own words, "So it goes". It simply happens; you really don't have any hope for Billy. But in Maus, you're rooting for Vladek. You feel the emotions he feels as you watch his story develop on each page, and you see what he saw. That what makes Maus so compelling and engaging.

Vonnegut vs. Spiegelman

After opening to the first page of Spiegelman's novel, I knew this would be a completely different reading experience from Vonnegut. However, both stories are centered around a war-veteran reliving events they went through during the war. The most obvious contrast between these two authors is that Maus is a graphic novel. The story is told in the form of a comic strip, with every page containing pictures and bubbles to represent what the character is saying.
Looking past the obvious, the writing styles of these two authors are quite different in my opinion. For me personally, I struggled reading Slaughterhouse Five because I felt that Kurt Vonnegut was so scatter-brained in telling his story. The narrator would jump around from Billy Pilgrim being in the war to his life after the war. Another confusing factor to this story was the possible (and debatable) "time-travel" that Billy Pilgrim experienced. I felt that Vonnegut was showing a symptom of PTSD by possibly just writing down things as they came into his mind. After a war, soldiers can struggle with concentrating on one thing which can cause their mind to jump around a lot. I felt that Vonnegut portrayed this in his writing.
Within the first few pages of Maus, I thought that this would be a much smoother story to follow. Even though the story jumps from Vladek telling his son stories of his life to an actual conversation between the both of them, the pictures make it easy to follow along with what is going on. When there is a present conversation with Artie and Vladek, they have it paired with a picture of two mice sitting down talking. As Vladek is telling stories, he seems to be very straight forward with what happened. He does not repeat himself, and his stories seem very realistic and believable to me.
I prefer reading Spiegelman's novel because it is very straightforward. Being a visual learner, I do think the pictures contribute to my favoritism for this novel. I personally just have trouble comprehending what I am reading in general, so when you jump around in telling a story, like Vonnegut, it is hard to keep track of what is going on.

            Telling a good war story is a complicated a process, but both Vonnegut and O’Brien do a terrific job by keeping us interested and turning the next page to see what happens next. Both authors have similar styles when it comes to narrating their exiting tales of war. They use some basic elements that put you in there with the characters. For example both use “war buddies” as a tools to transition from scene to scene. In both pieces of literature the language that is used is blunt and direct to the point, a sort of war vocabulary if you will. There are phrases like “I’m goanna kick the living shit out of you” and “you are motherfucker” and in reality that is how soldiers talk. The authors don’t dress up the narrative with pretty word or tales of heroism is pure and true. The authors bounce around from story to story, this way thy always keep you entrained and it allows them to give you different perspectives of the same. Their attention to detail is extraordinary by giving you so much precise information, like the color of the sky or how bodies were the color of purple and blue because of the cold they allow you to live the story and just read about it. Vonnegut and O’Brien also use flashbacks to put in the action and direct you to where in time they want to be. They also make references to biblical themes, in How to tell a true war story Court Lemon is describe like if he were going to the heavens after he was killed because of the way the sun touched his face. Vonnegut on the other hand has a bit with the bulletproof bible and the story of shining shoes that if you stare at them you can see Adam and Eve. Their biggest themes are both death and the laps of time.     

Vonnegut and O'Brien - Memories of War

In both pieces, I find that stories that they provided in each of their piece were completely unrelated to each other. IN Slaughter house five, every time when Billy closes his eyes, he appeared in different places at different moments of his life, and each event is separate and completely unrelated. Same here in the true war story, the author gave entirely unrelated stories from his memories of the past to serve as an example of his earlier statements.

However, even though these stories do not connect, both authors provided great detail of each stories. Such as the story where Billy was captured by the Germans, he saw the image of Adam and eve in the commander’s boot. Same to the true war story, details such as when the author was talking about the “crazy stuff”, he used detailed story including quotes from different people, to capture the fuller picture of the event.

From what I observed, there is a purpose to each story that authors provided in each pieces, it echoes with the opening statement of each section of the over story. I think in Slaughter house five, the author is trying to give examples of free will in the forms of his illusion throughout visiting moments of his life, also, he is showing that he has every experience that people desire, such as war experience, comrades, a stately home and wealth. For the true war story, one of the objectives of the author is obvious to present war story the assumed correct way, which is composed with the material that common people would think it is too normal and easily ignored, and adding great detail, for the objective of showing the audience what a true war story is like.

O'Brien or Vonnegut

After reading Slaughterhouse-five and How to tell a true war story, it is very prevalent that both authors have a pretty heavy case of PTSD. Both authors have multiple flash backs (or reoccurring repetitions of the same story) to points in time of their respective war that was fought and each time they flash back to a moment in the war they both change small detail almost like they are trying to have closure for those events in their lives. You can tell that both men are suffering hard from their PTSD and struggle through their daily lives trying to not let PTSD take over their lives completely.  While both of the authors tell their one story they stop to come back and comment on what they just wrote and would just contradict themselves.  I personally feel that each memory of the stories that they try to recall have a trigger of some sort whether it is a sound like a gun shot or even a word, there is something that triggers the brain to flash back at a specific moment and then also that the authors are only able to recall specific moments of the event. I personally know that a traumatic event has a massive affect upon a person whether it is from war or even just a slap on the wrist, continual exposure to the traumatic event without having a closure or a debriefing of some sort will leave a lot of open ended questions to the person that is being affected by the event. With all this being said in the end and through out the readings both authors definitely make you question whether the stories are true or what parts of the stories are true. The saddening truth is that even though they wrote the stories down, both authors still need help in healing their wounds, wounds of PTSD.