There is nothing laudable about young people leaving their homes in order to fight for their countries. Moreover, these young people are very different from how they are usually presented. They are frightened, horrified, and it would be absurd to ca Continue Reading...
Reason tells him that there must be something else, still to come, while he is fighting to stay alive and keep feeling. The author points out that, at some point, he decided to write the book as a "Children's Crusade," as the opposite of every past Continue Reading...
The best evidence for this suffusion in the author's own life is in the final chapter, when the main character/author returns in full force. Traveling peacefully and happily in a plane above Berlin, during a moment he considers "one of the nicest o Continue Reading...
This author used them to see how Kurt Vonnegut is post-modernist. Barry begins in number one by asking how authors discover postmodernist themes and attitudes. In the observation, postmodernists foreground fiction which might be said to exemplify t Continue Reading...
This idea appears repeatedly. When Billy proposes marriage to Valencia: Billy didn't want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged Continue Reading...
Starting with the names of the characters and continuing with many of the events in the novel, he is ironically picturing a consumer society that needs to rely on certainties in order to secure its present and avoid alienation, which is why the enti Continue Reading...
