Free Literature Review About Why Slaughter-House Five Is Reminiscent Of Sassoons Poetry

War is a subject that is frequently expressed in writing and literature. Two famous novels that treat, respectively, World War I and World War II are “All Quiet On The Western Front” and “Slaughter-house Five.” Using a different format, but also touching on the theme of war, is the poet Siegfried Sassoon who is one of the most famous and important poets of World War I. Though “All Quiet On The Western Front” and Sassoon´s poetry both cover aspects of World War I. Sassoon´s poetry is more reminiscent of “Slaughter-house Five,” Kurt Vonnegut´s semiautobiographical account of World War II. In both Vonnegut´s coverage of war, and Sassoon, there is a more realistic, vivid and lurid account of the realities in war that is reflected within the language of each work. “All Quiet On The Western Front,” while a compelling and important part of the “war literature cannon,” does not give as cutting and vivid account of war. Remarque is making political statements about war, whereas both “Slaughter-house Five” and “Sassoon” are making statements that pass politics and offer deeper insights about human nature.
“Stirring” is a good word to describe the poetry of Sassoon. His language takes you right there into the action, connects you with soldiers as individuals caught up in something larger than themselves who “loathed the war and longed for peace” (Sassoon). One of his most stirring poems, “The Rank Stench of Those Bodies Still Haunts Me” writes about the realities of soldiers seeing the putrid bodies of other soldiers, also there are verses which take readers into the actions, windows into soldiers pining for the women they love and have left behind.
This vividness of war is somewhat of a departure from “All Quiet On The Western Front” because it´s theme moves eventually away from the action and to the greater political significance of war. The primary goals of Vonnegut and Sassoon seem to be to portray war as closely to its reality as possible to the reader, whereas Erich Maria Remarque, while he does relate vivid passages of the reality of a war, has a secondary agenda up his sleeves which has greater political import than the works of Sassoon and Vonnegut. After the protagonist of “All Quiet On The Western Front” is sent back to his company, the emperor or Germany pays a visit to the front, and the men who see him are taken aback at the realization that the empire, ostensibly the person forcing them to fight this war, is nothing special, he is just a man, a short man with a weak voice. This is the key message of the book, that war is ridiculous since all war is petty men in power who force younger men to lose their lives to fight their battles. In Sassoon and Vonnegut, this message is not overt, but implicit; the explicit message is the horror of war.
Free will has been lost for soldiers in Vonnegut and Sassoon, and the inevitability of soldiers being forced to fight by their governments serves to make a greater statement about human nature, the human condition and whether or not free will is possible for humans in such a world. In Vonnegut´s first chapter, there is a particularly stirring sentiment invoked when the narrator addresses his publisher directly. He writes that the manuscript, which is of a non-linear form “is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre.” (Vonnegut, 1). Here the argument could be made that this sentiment is reminiscent of the theme, and title “All Is Quiet On The Western Front.” But what is being said in this quotation that the soldier after a war is a shadow of his self. He cannot go back to a time where he can unseen the atrocities of war that unfolded before his eyes. This theme, innocence lost, is very reminiscent of Sassoon´s poetry. One of Sassoon´s earliest poems, “Absolution” portrays this theme in a similar way that Vonnegut does in the first chapter of his book. Sassoon writes, “And loss of things desired; all things must pass.” (Sasson). Sassoon continues to explore these lost things, they are not just things desired, but parts of the soldier´s self. He writes, “There was an hour when we were loath to part / From life we longed to share no less than others . . . What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?” This conveys the message that is found in Vonnegut, that after war, there is little point in life, and little value in the things that were once desired.
Life goes on for Vonnegut and Sassoon´s soldiers, but it is a hallow life. Both witnesses to the wars they write about, their similarity in theme comes from a shared reaction to a similarly traumatic experience.