Research+Paper;+Slaughterhouse5

I began writing my research paper with little to no idea on how to rip Vonnegut's message out of the fairly complex beast he had written. This signaled the first time in the year that I really

learned how to delve deeper and truly dissect the author's words. Of course, it took me several weeks to do so, but it was just the beginning. In my research paper, I was proving that

Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 had a universal idea that humans can not directly deal with the horrors of war. I effectively broke down many scenes and sentences to clearly show

Vonnegut's message, such as;

"She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel

embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life,

and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all" (Vonnegut 102). Vonnegut

writes this scene with little description to give a tone of apathy. The fact Billy is upset by his

mother simply for being his mother raises the question of whether Billy has compassion for

anything or not. Vonnegut accentuates Billy’s scorn for life by having the character admit to his

detachment from it (Simpson 12).

Despite clearly explaining and elaborating these ideas, I had a hard time connecting my ideas. I had elaborated points that weren't connected. Another difference is that I used sentences

as a whole, instead of using select words and what effect they had on the piece. This is a key difference between my analytical skills now and my skills then. Now I am able to use

singular words to prove my point and show how it connects to the rest of the passage. After reading my essay again, I noticed that my essay was not polished at all. My sentences were

choppy, grammatically incomplete, and sometimes completely ambiguous. Many of my sentences need to become complex so that my ideas were more clarified and complete. Overall, I

thought I did extremely well on explaining my points but did not effectively connect my ideas or explain the author's tone adequately.