Thursday, December 26, 2019

Review The American Revolution in Indian Country - 720 Words

Malcolm X once said â€Å"We (African-Americans) didnt land on Plymouth Rock, the rock was landed on us.†1 While not comparing it as such, nor discounting in any way the tremendous suffering and struggle for equality African-Americans have endured, this work presents a very strong argument that the native peoples of North America, have suffered as much or arguably more so. Indeed several bands had already been obliterated by disease and war with the White invaders from the sea before most of the English colonies were even well established, a pattern which would only continue to get worse. For the Indians living in what is now the eastern United States in the 1770s, the revolution was merely the continuation of a generational war they had been steadily losing for over a century already. Native peoples all across the vast hinterlands had coped with the destruction of their lives and livelihoods as they always had, by adapting and evolving as their situations changed which contin ued through the revolutionary and beyond. The prologue presents a sweeping, but well described overview of the complex network of interwoven societies that existed in North America on the eve of the American Revolution. America was already well on its way to becoming the great melting pot of societies and cultures by the mid-1700s. It had become a world where boundaries, bloodlines, and loyalties were all largely fluid and often blurred, with many of the key players being of mixed race of Indian,Show MoreRelatedBook Review of Liberty and Power Essay959 Words   |  4 PagesWang, N.Y. Review written by Richard Foust Book Review Harry L. Watson’s book, â€Å"Liberty and Power, The Politics of Jacksonian America†, takes an analytical look at America and her politics during the Age of Jackson. Watson uses the economy and the ideological mindset of the people, to support a powerful argument about the beginning of American political parties and their importance in defining the political direction of the country. Watson arguesRead MoreWorld Is Flat: Great Sorting Out Essay1315 Words   |  6 Pagessocieties will have to deal with and adapt to the changes that globalization brings to the way of doing business. It affects whole companies and individuals. He gives the perception of the world is flattening by comparing the Industrial Revolution to the IT Revolution that is happening right now. The flattening process was identified by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels in the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. Marx’s writings about capitalism state â€Å"the inexorable march of technology and capitalRead MoreRemoval Act of 1830 Essay1481 Words   |  6 Pagesman many thousands of years ago from Eurasia to the American continent. The people from the migration to the Americas had absolutely no contact with the people in Europe and Asia after they migrated. In fact, the two civilizations evolved in totally different manners, and at different speeds. The people in the Americas, or Native Americans existed mainly as hunter-gatherers using tools of bone, wood, and useful animal parts. Native Americans formed their beliefs into many different religions,Read MoreViolence Brought by Violence1464 Words   |  6 PagesMilitarism was one of the reasons because when a nation starts to mobilize troops in attempt to keep the country free of threat, other countries will do the same (Aldous). Alliance was stated because an alliance is basically a promise to watch other’s back (Aldous). This happens to be the worst kind since when two countries go to war, it really is no t just two but all the allies of those countries will join the war in attempt to watch the other’s back. Imperialism was one of the causes because thisRead MoreRevolutionary Mothers : Women During The Struggle For America s Independence By Carol Berkin1612 Words   |  7 PagesIntroduction A critical analysis entails the review of the book Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the struggle for America’s independence by Carol Berkin. This comprised of details on women who had been involved in struggling to fulfill the independence of America. Women played their role at facing or creating impact towards the war. This outlines on myriad of women,s lives as well as getting to know the obstacles that they encountered during the war. This aids in bringing out the idea that not onlyRead MoreBook Analysis: The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution1280 Words   |  6 PagesThe Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920. By Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico, 2007. Print.) This is the most comprehensive collection of The Texas Rangers during the Mexican revolution that has been published. Charles Harris III and Louis Sadler share the details behind this unstable period by uncovering the views and actions of the Rangers during the highest point of border violence up until that time. The RangersRead More`` The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow `` : How Did Irving And Sedgwick Use American History?1520 Words   |  7 Pagesa remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane† (Washington Irving, â€Å"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow†, 1820). How did Irving and Sedgwick use American history in their writings? Well into the early 19th Century the idea of ‘The American’ was far reserved from what we recognize now, due in a large part to the the lack of a credible sense of culture and history emitted from the settlers. Whilst the Revolution had asserted theirRead MoreEssay about Nature’s Influence on the War of 18121690 Words   |  7 Pagesvictor and the issues that caused the conflict were never resolved. Nature played a crucial role in the outcome. Because of humanity’s natural strive for power, the living and fighting conditions of the soldiers, and the geographical layout of the countries involved, nature was a driving force during the War of 1812. Hunger and greed are a part of human nature as much, if not more than, any other emotion. The struggle for power and land has driven humanity since the beginning of time. Wars andRead MoreTechnological Advancements of the Victorian Period Essay1863 Words   |  8 PagesThe Industrial Revolution changed financial, political and social elements of Victorian society. The revolution can be broken down to the effects of social order and the economy, and the matter of the industrial revolution can then be looked into as parts. In the first stage, it contends the positive effect of the Industrial Revolution on economy and urbanization. There was a colossal benefit picked up from the Industrial Revolution by the privileged and the government. However, the working populationRead MoreA Delegate Of The Constitutional Convention1257 Words   |  6 Pagesthe constitutional convention in Philadelphia made this statement about James Wilson Government seems to have been his peculiar study, all the political institutions of the world he knows in detail, and can trace the causes and effects of every revolution from the earliest stages of the Grecian commonwealth down to the present time. This statement describes James Wilson to a tee, he not only had how the government worked memorized but he also could take that knowledge and infuse it into the constitution

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

What is Psychosocial Development - 948 Words

What is psychosocial development? Psychosocial development is development on a social realm. Psychosocial development is how one develops their mind, maturity level, and emotions over the course of one’s life. The rate of development depends on different factors such as biological processes as well as environmental factors. A man named Erik Erikson who was a psychoanalyst who believed that early childhood successes and failures were responsible for influencing later developmental stages developed this theory. Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is based around the theory that social experience has an impact over an entire lifespan. There are eight stages developmental stages of development in the psychosocial theory and I will†¦show more content†¦These plans could include things such as what kind of career they want, their sexual orientation, and who they are in life (Cooper, 1998). The intimacy vs. isolation stage is between the ages of 19 to 40 and is very important to the relationships one will hold during these years. Erikson believed that it did not matter how successful one was financially, they are not truly complete developmentally until one is capable of true intimacy. People that have not successfully created a sense of identity will have a fear of commitment however, someone that has successfully developed a sense of self is able to form bonds and create successful relationships as an adult (Davis Clifton, 95). Middle adulthood is the generatively vs. stagnation stages in which an adult must care of others and realize that they need a family or a legacy. During this stage, people will nurture their own family or find ways to nurture others that need to be nurtured outside their immediate family. If an adult does not overcome the crisis during this stage, then they will not grow which will result in them being selfish and self-centered. The last stage in Erikson’s theory is the integrity vs. despair important s tage. This is the time in one’s life when they begin to look at their life and the role that they have played in life. As one reflects on theirShow MoreRelatedReflect Upon Your Own Life in Terms of the Eriksons 8 Stages of Psychosocial Development and Write About What Was Your Experience Like Handling Each of the Eight Developmental Tasks/Conflicts.3296 Words   |  14 Pagesexperiences eight crises or conflicts in development. During each of the eight stages of personality development, a specific developmental task or conflict will be more significant than any other. Please reflect upon your own life in terms of the Erikson’s 8 stages of Psychosocial Development and write about what was your experience like handling each of the eight developmental tasks/conflicts (where applicable). Erikson’s Psycho-Social Development Erik Erikson theory consists of 8 stagesRead MoreThe Effects Of Midlife Psychosocial Development On Cognitive And Emotional Health1331 Words   |  6 Pagesconsequences of midlife psychosocial development in relation to late-life cognitive and emotional health. It is relevant in my age group particularly in my husband’s case who is in his mid-thirties. Although I have been aware of the implications of certain psychosocial factors in someone’s well-being, I wanted to know the other aspects of midlife psychosocial development and its effect as the person ages. 2. Summary of related literature or studies Erikson’s psychosocial development theory became theRead MoreI Find This Journal Article Interesting As It Discussed1335 Words   |  6 Pagesconsequences of midlife psychosocial development in relation to late-life cognitive and emotional health. It is relevant in my age group, particularly in my husband’s case who is in his mid-thirties. Although I have been aware of the implications of certain psychosocial factors in someone’s well-being, I wanted to know the other aspects of midlife psychosocial development and its effect as the person ages. 2. A summary of related literature or studies Erikson’s psychosocial development theory became theRead MoreErikson s Theory For Psychosocial Development1000 Words   |  4 PagesErikson was a theorist who focused on his theory for psychosocial development. The article Psychosocial Identity Development Theories, highlights the keys points and idea of Erikson’s psychosocial theory. Erikson was very focused on the idea of ego identity and obtaining full potential. His theory or â€Å"model† stats that, â€Å"identity formation is based on overcoming conflicts that individuals encounter during adolescent and early childhood.†(Karkouti, 2014, p.257) He believed that all people must endureRead MoreTeaching Young Children Self Regulation Through Children s Books By Patricia Cooper Essay1299 Words   |  6 Pageschildren’s psychosocial development. The article argues that teachers need to understand how certain pieces of literature affects a child’s psychosocial development and how teachers s hould go about choosing books that most positively affect psychosocial development. According to Cooper (2007), the article uses a combination of Dewey’s impetus for learning and Vygotsky’s theory that learning precedes development through scaï ¬â‚¬olded social interaction, Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, and Rosenblatt’sRead MoreErik Erikson s Theory Of Psychosocial Development884 Words   |  4 Pagesfamous theory of psychosocial development and the concept of the identity crisis. His theories marked an important shift in thinking on personality; instead of focusing simply on early childhood event, his psychosocial theory looked at how social influences contribute to personality throughout the entire lifespan. Erik Erikson died May 12, 1994 due to prostate cancer. (Erik Erikson, 2015). Stages of Psychosocial Development Comprehension of Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development requires anRead MoreErikson s Psychosocial Theory : Development Of Ego Identity1293 Words   |  6 PagesZoi Arvanitidis 05/16/17 ECEE-310 Dr.Alkins Studying Erikson’s Psychosocial theory Erik Erikson was a student of another theorist, Sigmund Freud. Erikson expanded on Freud’s psychosexual theory. Erikson later developed the psychosocial theory. This theory described the effect of one’s social experiences throughout one’s whole lifespan. One of the main elements of Erikson’s psychosocial theory is the development of ego identity. Ego identity is the conscious sense of self that we developRead MoreThe Boys Building A Racetrack1207 Words   |  5 Pagesencounters the situation where he tries to explain to all of the other boys around him to join and help him. Bob begins explaining this idea that he believes is brilliant. The other boys seem to be hearing what Bob is saying, but throughout the video, it is hard to see if the other boys truly understood what Bob was saying to them. In order for the five-year-old boy to build his racetrack, he needs to use some of the blocks from the other students. Being the considerate five-year-old boy B ob is, he asksRead MoreErikson s Psychosocial Theory And Psychosocial Development1561 Words   |  7 Pagesto know what we know now. There are many theories in the field of psychology or educational psychology that are important to further understand human behavior. However, this paper will focus on only two theories which are; Erikson’s psychosocial theory and Alfred Adler’s Adlerian theory. Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development has always been a great contribution to the field of psychology by Erik Erikson (Berk, 2007). Erikson suggested that everyone experiences a series of psychosocial stages insteadRead MoreEarly Childhood Psychosocial Development Essay1307 Words   |  6 Pages The development starts from infant until old age. Childhood is a time of tremendous change, but people also continue to grow slowly and develop during adulthood. It is a continuous process with a predictable sequence. These developmental changes may be influenced by genetic factor, environment factor and maturation factor. There are three types of human development changes: physical development, cognitive development and psychosocial development. Our group member’s choice is psychosocial development

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Supplier Relationship Management SRM

Question: Describe about the Supplier Relationship Management? Answer: SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) highlights towards the protocol and the practice, which are commonly found to be associated with suppliers. It can be analyzed that most of the suppliers highlight SRM as an organized approach to define the need and demand for the providers. It further focuses on establishing and thereby managing the concept of company-to-company linkage. This is obtained to fulfill the needs of the sector. When there is no conscious procurement-supplier linkage, the practices along with the protocol in play are termed to be informal. However, formal or not, the academic along with the consulting researchers tend to organize approaches for the supplies. The protocol highlights towards the development of positive sourcing results. The protocol of SRM highlights towards the relation numbers 3 through 6. The primary emphasis of the concept lies in the identification of the performance attributes that are attained from the suppliers. Managing these aspects based on the relationship highlights towards the consequences. The Opportunity sourcing (i.e. number 7) focuses towards the practices associated with the current need of sources. This is considered to be true discovery, which is an initiative to identify and thereby determining the usefulness of the protocol. This is frequent in both the high-tech industries along with High Margin Consumer Product industries. It is often encountered that the supply professionals tend to have innovative product revenues as a part of the performance metrics. It can be assumed that every relationship tends to require dynamic management along with the practical leadership attributes that develop benefits for an organization. As one shift from length price relationship towards the development of a joint venture, the business linkages become closer and well defined. The benefits calculated are much deeper and broader. The internal relationship is considered equally important as the external ones. The SRM domain tends to link the standard operations such as accounting, logistics, and engineering. The Intrinsic factors found to work against the concerted efforts of the suppliers. It can also create high consistency of the various purposes associated with an organization. It can be stated that there are two types of measurements, i.e. targets and means. The objectives tend to the end goals, which are being sought. This includes the cost, price, quality, logistic details, marketing timing, etc. The means of measurement are considered the sub-component activities, which adds for accomplishing the targets. A common fault that is associated with the context is the over requiring means of measurements. The simpler approach is to perform several ended goal targets. The primary motto of involving stakeholders, understanding the final market, creating aligned measures are all associated with this context. Whether a defined target is used, it has been encountered that the stakeholders have their impact on the performance of the group. The concept of SRM is commonly found to be associated with strategic rollout sourcing. Thereby it can be analyzed that the management and the leadership of working with the strategic suppliers are preferred by pure transactional attributes. Every SRM is associated with determination and communication needs, which further focuses in expectation of the suppliers, performance measurement, and involvement of action for compliance. The interactions are involved in providing the suppliers with expectations of communication along with the flow of the products and services. Moreover, SRM categorizes the supply along with the markets of the goods and services, which interacts with the selected suppliers to meet the measurable performance goals. SEM highlights towards the development of suppliers to acquire the benefit of buying a company or an organization. SRM focuses on identifying and thereby measuring the suppliers through measurement, oversight, and management. The closer collaborative supplier relationships are of two types. This involves the suppliers possessing capabilities for buying the company, which does not have enough strategy needs and demands. The basic goal of SRM highlights towards the development of communication with the suppliers. They tend to share a methodology, business term and the information to improve familiarity with one another. SRM intends in ensuring the providers and thereby familiarize better core business of the enterprise. The SRM solution editors define the protocol based on four stages: a) Cooperative Design: It consists of the integration of the supply problems associated with designing of the products. This involves suppliers through cooperative design tools. This ensures minimum costing at every level. b) Identification of suppliers: This highlights towards the purpose of identifying potential suppliers. Preparation of scorecard is attained by qualifying them according to their cost and production capacity, delivery deadline and the quality guarantees. Finally, the best suppliers are invited to submit their bids. c) Selection of Suppliers: The suppliers are selected by Reverse Auction Mechanism. The role of the buyer and the seller are reversed in this context. The SRM tools have bidden interface that makes it possible to undergo three types of requests (known as RFx). These are as follows: i) RFQ (Request for Quotation): Simple application towards the quoted price. The supplier submitting the lowest bid is selected. ii) RFP (Request for Proposal): Request demanding to present the commercial proposal, specifying the price and information of the company. The properties of production capacities stock and delivery deadlines are counteracted with this protocol. The selected supplier evaluates the proposal based on different criteria. iii) RFI (Request for Information): This consists of issuing a simple request for information based on the products and services offered by the supplier. This is not necessarily implied on bidding. iv) Negotiation: This formalizes the contract between the providers (selected) and enterprise, which includes specific clauses regarding logistics, service quality, payment terms and other duties. It is often encountered that the challenges of supplier relationship management are the increasing reliance on them and exposing the risk factors. The protocol and role of the transaction are ill defined, which inhibit further performance improvement. This limit the value forms of the supplier relationship and thereby it makes the performance more efficient. Even though there are various suppliers who are tracked and thus reported, the performance, issues may seem to persist, and the organization may not have the ability to recoup with the resulting cost. It has been estimated that most of the organization identifies the suppliers, which are strategic and thereby can be managed efficiently. In the absence of the clear set of supplier management protocol, the role of the providers in the organization tends to set the agenda and the canvas for the building organization. The initial aggressive sourcing for most of the companies yields dramatic savings and other benefits, which sustains the benefits of attaining higher reductions. This would have been difficult without an effective SRM system. The formal program for the supplier development does not exist in limiting the organizations ability to form a win-win value with the supply base. Their inefficiency introduces towards many employees for spending time on the unnecessary reluctant interactions with the suppliers. The procurement functioning plays a leadership role in sourcing and ongoing activities. As the sourcing matures in an organization, the objectives along with value proposition of purchase need to be evolved simultaneously. Most of the organizations lack the system capabilities, which are required to be regularly supported by the supplier management across the supplier lifecycle. References Burnson, P. (9 June 2014). New Focus on Supplier Relationship Management. Retrieved from https://www.scmr.com/article/new_focus_on_supplier_relationship_management.Engel, B. (2011). 10 Best Practices You Should Be Doing Now. Retrieved from https://supplychainquarterly.com/Guest Contributor. (3 December 2013).North Rizza, M. (17 February 2015). The Five Secrets of Supplier Relationship Management. Retrieved from https://www.supplymanagement.com/

Monday, December 2, 2019

Slaughterhouse Five Themes and Symbolism Essay Example

Slaughterhouse Five: Themes and Symbolism Paper Slaughterhouse-Fives durability as a satiric masterwork is explained by two factors. First, the 1960s appear increasingly as a definitive era as we move further away from them. This is true for the reason that in that decade, with the help of television, domestic violence and martial violence merged for the first time in the cultural imagination. The Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, student riots, racial battles, political assassinations, as well as our usual glut of homicides, rapes, and assaults turned out to be the design of the national fabric. Second, Vonneguts satire is the best from the era and the sharpest commentary on the era. By way of layered points of view, we are forced outside Slaughterhouse-Five to get the frightful picture of the civilians killed at Dresden, a massacre that Ira C. Eaker and Sir Robert Saundby so staunchly defend (166). â€Å"In Vonneguts text we hear about the corpse factory to which Dresden is reduced and know that it reeks of mustard gas and roses, but we are not eyewitnesses or participants†. (Peter J. Reed, pp 88-101)The factual source of great innovation in Slaughterhouse Five is how Vonnegut transforms the war model into an excremental vision that efficiently captures the instinctual and definitive violence of the human animal. Vonneguts precise term is excrement festival. While he develops the notion all through the narrative, the specific metaphorical identifier takes place in one of the defining episodes of the narrative, when the English prisoners see the diarrheic Americans fouling their tidy latrine:â€Å"Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. . . . Billy reeled away from his vision of Hell. He passed three Englishmen who were watching the excrement festival from a distance. They were catatonic with disgust†. (113-114)Vonnegut makes use of excrement festival as rhetorical shorthand for a basic horror that lies beyond the capabilities of conventional language. The deductive plan for which excrementfestival is substituted might be stated consequently: War is the most gigantic expression of human violence. Modern warfare has turned out to be so terrible that rhetoric fails to describe it. What, therefore, is the merely further fundamental and universal human action that might replace war and serve as a literary allegory for violence? Vonneguts answer, as seen in the excrement festival description, is bodily functions. They are, ironically the great democratic constant. Festival and the joy the term means show that Vonnegut is not taking himself or the process very seriously. Like Walt Whitman, he celebrates the bodily functions; however he does so with an absurd humor that the nineteenth-century romantic would hardly appreciate, or recognize. (Patrick Hruby, pp 88-101)For Vonnegut excre ment means all the waste matter discharged from the body, including semen. Perhaps orificial vision would be a more appropriate designation for Vonneguts satire, since the term covers all the bodily apertures through which Vonnegut sees waste oozing or exploding. However, excrement festival is Vonneguts own term, used with fall awareness of its Swiftian and Freudian connotations. It is thus the more appropriate phrase to use in discussing Vonneguts motif.Vonneguts recognizing these fundamental associations among war, excrement, and the ideas by which America identifies itself is at once simple and ingenious. Using various techniques, Vonnegut artfully correlates the associations. The simplest narrative device he uses to correlate the three elements is the conventional rhetorical connectors that unite excrement, war, and American values. For example, Roland Weary, the rabid defender of democracy, threatens to beat the living shit out of Pilgrim. Valencia Merble and the callous girl a t the Chicago City News Bureau both eat Three Musketeers bars, thereby connecting themselves to Wearys idiotic identification with Dumass fabulous martial quartet. Such connectors effectively anticipate the more subtle digestion motif identified as the excrement festival.With the digestion motif, Vonnegut unifies all other significant elements of the text regarding war and waste production. â€Å"Lest we forget, digestion is the process of enzymes relentlessly attacking food inside the body. This essential life process in turn produces feces, urine, sweat, phlegm, and other waste materials that make up Vonneguts excrement festival. Therefore, the human body is both a very efficient waste producer and a macrocosmic battle ground of unrelenting violence†. (Peter J. Reed, 1997)Like the collective human body called society, the individual human body is in a constant duty dance with death. The body will ultimately dance its last and become waste that in turn becomes food for other microbes that carry on the same eternal battle. So it goes. Others have used the war-biology metaphor before, as Hemingway does in A Farewell to Arms, where he develops the biological trap concept. Only Vonnegut, however, develops this attack-and destroys cycle of the digestive processes into the linchpin association between war and excrement. Once developed, it works on levels ranging from the absolutely ridiculous and juvenile to the totally tragic and extra-linguistic. (Wayne D. McGinnis, pp 200-233)In Slaughterhouse-Five, the rhetoric of violence is the seemingly endless obscenities used to describe the excrement festival. Vonneguts references to filth are so abundant that wardens of the national virtue have often tried to ban Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut himself refers in Palm Sunday to his battles with book-burners in North Dakota; and the Christian Science Monitor reports that a circuit court judge in Oakland County, Michigan ordered that Slaughterhouse-Five be removed from the schools. It is, the judge declared, a degradation of the person of Christ and full of repetitious obscenity and immorality' (681). To enumerate all the references to bodily functions that make up this repetitious obscenity would require that we separate the implied or metaphorical allusions from the overt. The simple fact is that excremental allusions ranging from basic Anglo-Saxon profanities to sophomoric double entendres to complex metaphors dominate the text of Slaughterhouse Five. From the mass, there are four substantive examples to illustrate the development of Vonneguts themes and symbolism: the description of the Tralfamadorian, the prison boxcar scene, the backward move, and the photograph of the girl and pony. (Is this the thesis? YES)Billy Pilgrims description of his alien kidnapers is the indispensable summary passage in the narrative design. It pictorializes the creatures who form the core of Vonneguts satire and who determine Pilgrims peculiar philosophy. (Kathry n Hume, pp 155-178)The initial point to make about the Tralfamadorians is that because they have no concept of death they also have no concept of pain or suffering. Thus they personify pure violence. With a shrug, and dismissing the act with their usual So it goes, they blow the universe to bits without qualms or regrets. Also, these are second generation or second stage Tralfamadorians. In The Sirens of Titan the Tralfamadorians are not peculiarlyshaped and emotionless machines. They are very much like humans. Feeling superior, they invent a machine to do all their low purpose tasks. When the machine reports to them that they have no purpose at all, they therefore start killing each other because they hate things that have no purpose. This irrational, violent demise foreshadows the fate that awaits Earthlings.The two features most striking about the Tralfamadorian are: (1) its likeness to the common household gadget used to unclog toilets, and (2) its exaggerated optic capacity. Th ese are the two characteristics that Vonnegut uses to establish the connection between everyday, ordinary domestic life and imminent violence. Despite this spastic world view, Pilgrim is the typical American. He is a harmless drudge from a dysfunctional family who does his military duty, goes to school, marries the ugly daughter of a wealthy man, fills a respectable job and dreams of escape from the Capitalist rut. When in psychological crisis, therefore, it is fitting that Pilgrim turns not to the crucified Christ whose picture hangs above his bed but to the American values that have caused his crisis. He envisions his savior in the image of an ordinary household device used for loosening excrement and accumulated filth from sewage pipes.Symbolically, this is the same function that the Tralfamadorians perform for Pilgrim: they cleanse the pipes of his perception, unclog his vision by disabusing him of historical, sociological fixations. The parallax view of this function is that Pi lgrim himself is also excrement. He cannot willfully inflict pain upon another human being. Consequently, no matter how benevolent his intentions or how financially successful he becomes; he remains a scrap of human waste sticking in the cultural pipes. Pilgrim cannot alter the social predicament, but thanks to a brain trauma and the Tralfamadorians, he transfers his dilemma to a second dimension. He comes unstuck in time (26), thereby unclogging his own perceptions so that he realizes the negligibility of death, and the true nature of time (169). To realize the true nature of time simply means to quit trying to understand time. That is, by complying in his own status as waste, he frees himself from spatio-temporal reality. He lets go of all intellectual pretense and philosophical biases and drifts into a psychic state where he is untethered to any moral or political codes. He is freed from cultural gravity.In the context of this historical reality, poetic vision is nonsensical. Von negut makes no claim to it and has no faith in it. His narrator self observes ironically that Among the things Billy could not change were the past, the present, and the future (58). Though Pilgrim is truly a seer, unlike the idealistic poets, he fails to convince the populace that he is anything other than a madman.This sight metaphor carries over to the second summary passage: Vonneguts description of the American prisoners in the German boxcars:â€Å"To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language†. (66-678)The boxcar scene shows how our pipes get so clogged. Everything entering the human body or mindfood, language, historyemerges as waste. The shit and piss and language are the ultimate product of all human endeavors. In th e microcosmic confines of the prison car, the men are reduced to their basic biological form: they are consumers and excreters, a collective singular waste-producing organism. They see the world only through occasional cracks in the boxcar door or through the ventilators, a condition paralleling the human tunnel vision that the Tralfamadorians later ridicule. Moreover, the boxcar further shows how human vision is impaired by human waste. The prisoners view the universe through the same apertures that have just been fouled by their own excrement. (Sanford Pinsker, pp 42-66).The direct connection between the boxcar and the beautiful, doomed city is that the sausage eaten by the American prisoners probably comes from the Dresden slaughterhouse. The black bread too later shows up in the kitchen of Schlachthoffà ¼nf, cooked for the Americans by an impatient German war widow (142). In this way the Dresden slaughterhouse produces the excrement that comes out through the boxcar apertures. Dresden epitomizes urban civilization. There the genius of man produced a viable monument to architecture, music, and art, as described by Mary Endell in 1908 (21). That same genius produces the prison trains and the bombs that destroy Dresden. That incineration reduces Dresdens inhabitants to tons of human bone meal (7), a metaphor that returns us to the waste producing example from which we began. The narrative cycle encompassing Dresden and the prison boxcar symbolizes the conflict between the human instinct to violence and the conscious awareness that such violence must be controlled lest the species disappear. It is a lesson, obviously, that humans have not learned.The boxcar scene also symbolizes Slaughterhouse-Five per se. The book itself is part of Vonneguts excrement festival. Vonnegut has consumed hunks and fragments of history, the most indigestible being his experiences in Dresden. He says that he thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden (8), but discovers that he suffers from a creative constipation that remains unrelieved for twenty-three years. In trying to purge Dresden from his memory he recalls a limerick that concludes: And now you wont pee you old fool (8). By tragicomically associating his own inability to write with the inability to urinate, and by expressing his frustration in a bawdy limerick, Vonnegut shows that his novel is the ultimate example of the excremental motif that sustains it. Slaughterhouse Five is, in short, the waste product of Vonneguts illustration of the imagination. Language, whether written or oral, is merely part of the excrement that passes through the mental ventilators. (Thomas Reed Whissen, pp 321-329)The third summary passage exemplifies the war technology implied in the boxcar episode. The scene in which Pilgrim imagines viewing a war movie backward, perhaps more overtly than any other in the novel, shows how closely violence is linked with every trait of the human animal. Vonn egut was not the first to exploit the similarity of bomber. Vonnegut, however, greatly extends the suitable Freudian metaphor. To the bombers defecation he adds the fighter planes spewing bullets in steel ejaculation. Like Freud, whom he satirizes, Vonnegut associates defecation and ejaculation with destructiveness: war, in one way or another, is the collective human response to sexuality and poor toilet training. (William E. K. Meyer Jr, pp 78)In Pilgrims idealistic dream world, however, evil and brutality are removed from the excremental-sexual processes. Pilgrim imagines that the indefinite reversal of the biological functions will terminate in the re-perfection of Adam and Eve, the original apple-eaters, sinners, and waste producers. Appropriately, Pilgrim sees Eves modern counterparts as the ones who eliminate the dangerous contents from the cylinders that suggests both the phallic and the fecal. Pilgrim characteristically misses the point that Eve is the typical mother of evil and that the modern women who now disarm the bombs also produced the soldiers and bombardiers who use the weapons to kill the sons and daughters of other mothers. In Pilgrims defense, however, we have to remember that when he envisions the comforting reversal depicted in the backward movie, he has not yet been re-educated by the Tralfamadorians. The spacemen soon come to flush such romantic sentimentalism (shit, Vonnegut would say) from his mind. They eliminate the myths, old wives tales, and historical-psychological sewage from his thinking. Conventional wisdom judges him insane, but the psychic flushing is nonetheless what frees Pilgrim from his mother, his wife Valencia, his intrusive daughter Barbara, and other daughters of Eve. Once freed, he replaces them with his ideal Eve: Montana Wildhack, a porn queen whore. (Jerome Klinkowitz, pp 77-102)The fourth summary passage is not so much a scene as a recurring emblem. Vonnegut, like Swift with his maps and charts, has a penchant f or graphics. Therefore this fourth instance is another graphic, though one that does not appear literally in the novel but only in the readers interesting imagination. It is the dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony (40). This is the first pornographic photograph in history, having been made in 1841 by Andrà © Le Fà ¨ve, an assistant to Louis Daguerre. Like a bawdy cue card, the photo pops up throughout history and Vonneguts narrative. Le Fà ¨ve defends it as representing mythological couplings. Despite this artistic effort, he is condemned as a pornographer and dies in prison. Roland Weary, in World War II, carries a copy as part of his survival kit. The Germans who capture him steal it. Pilgrim stumbles across another copy in 1968 while investigating a New York porn shop that is appropriately adorned with fly shit on the windows (177).Not only is the photograph a graphic example of absurd and a mocking reminder of what Eves sin has led her daughters to, but it is another link in Vonneguts thematic satire of artistic creation. John Keats urn, for instance, is an unravished bride of quietness and a Sylvan historian that also depicts a scene of seduction from Greek myth. Like the doomed original photographer of the woman-and-pony tableau, Keats ode claims to make a statement about truth and beauty. Vonneguts reoccurring photograph of a willing whore about to be ravished by a horse, however, is a reminder that throughout history love has been the accelerating converter in a waste producing machine. One of the cruelest aspects of the joke implied by the photograph is about poets such as Keats who attempt to understand and transcribe the foolishness of humankind. Love, art, and the general human dilemma are not expressed in pretty sonnets, but in profane poetry such as that sung by the barbershop quartet for Pilgrims father. (Sanford Pinsker, pp 42-66)The ultimate irony underlying the excremental vision is that humans have developed some truly beautiful, inspiring myths and ideas (the Garden of Eden, Heaven, Nirvana, Love, Art). The powerful instinct to violence, however, with all its resultant horrors, has distorted such visions beyond recognition. Little in Vonnegut argues for optimism, but deep in the black mass of his absurdist talent flickers a minute candle of possibility. Slaughterhouse Five Themes and Symbolism Essay Example Slaughterhouse Five: Themes and Symbolism Paper Slaughterhouse-Fives durability as a satiric masterwork is explained by two factors. First, the 1960s appear increasingly as a definitive era as we move further away from them. This is true for the reason that in that decade, with the help of television, domestic violence and martial violence merged for the first time in the cultural imagination. The Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, student riots, racial battles, political assassinations, as well as our usual glut of homicides, rapes, and assaults turned out to be the design of the national fabric. Second, Vonneguts satire is the best from the era and the sharpest commentary on the era. By way of layered points of view, we are forced outside Slaughterhouse-Five to get the frightful picture of the civilians killed at Dresden, a massacre that Ira C. Eaker and Sir Robert Saundby so staunchly defend (166). â€Å"In Vonneguts text we hear about the corpse factory to which Dresden is reduced and know that it reeks of mustard gas and roses, but we are not eyewitnesses or participants†. (Peter J. Reed, pp 88-101)The factual source of great innovation in Slaughterhouse Five is how Vonnegut transforms the war model into an excremental vision that efficiently captures the instinctual and definitive violence of the human animal. Vonneguts precise term is excrement festival. While he develops the notion all through the narrative, the specific metaphorical identifier takes place in one of the defining episodes of the narrative, when the English prisoners see the diarrheic Americans fouling their tidy latrine:â€Å"Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. . . . Billy reeled away from his vision of Hell. He passed three Englishmen who were watching the excrement festival from a distance. They were catatonic with disgust†. (113-114)Vonnegut makes use of excrement festival as rhetorical shorthand for a basic horror that lies beyond the capabilities of conventional language. The deductive plan for which excrementfestival is substituted might be stated consequently: War is the most gigantic expression of human violence. Modern warfare has turned out to be so terrible that rhetoric fails to describe it. What, therefore, is the merely further fundamental and universal human action that might replace war and serve as a literary allegory for violence? Vonneguts answer, as seen in the excrement festival description, is bodily functions. They are, ironically the great democratic constant. Festival and the joy the term means show that Vonnegut is not taking himself or the process very seriously. Like Walt Whitman, he celebrates the bodily functions; however he does so with an absurd humor that the nineteenth-century romantic would hardly appreciate, or recognize. (Patrick Hruby, pp 88-101)For Vonnegut excre ment means all the waste matter discharged from the body, including semen. Perhaps orificial vision would be a more appropriate designation for Vonneguts satire, since the term covers all the bodily apertures through which Vonnegut sees waste oozing or exploding. However, excrement festival is Vonneguts own term, used with fall awareness of its Swiftian and Freudian connotations. It is thus the more appropriate phrase to use in discussing Vonneguts motif.Vonneguts recognizing these fundamental associations among war, excrement, and the ideas by which America identifies itself is at once simple and ingenious. Using various techniques, Vonnegut artfully correlates the associations. The simplest narrative device he uses to correlate the three elements is the conventional rhetorical connectors that unite excrement, war, and American values. For example, Roland Weary, the rabid defender of democracy, threatens to beat the living shit out of Pilgrim. Valencia Merble and the callous girl a t the Chicago City News Bureau both eat Three Musketeers bars, thereby connecting themselves to Wearys idiotic identification with Dumass fabulous martial quartet. Such connectors effectively anticipate the more subtle digestion motif identified as the excrement festival.With the digestion motif, Vonnegut unifies all other significant elements of the text regarding war and waste production. â€Å"Lest we forget, digestion is the process of enzymes relentlessly attacking food inside the body. This essential life process in turn produces feces, urine, sweat, phlegm, and other waste materials that make up Vonneguts excrement festival. Therefore, the human body is both a very efficient waste producer and a macrocosmic battle ground of unrelenting violence†. (Peter J. Reed, 1997)Like the collective human body called society, the individual human body is in a constant duty dance with death. The body will ultimately dance its last and become waste that in turn becomes food for other microbes that carry on the same eternal battle. So it goes. Others have used the war-biology metaphor before, as Hemingway does in A Farewell to Arms, where he develops the biological trap concept. Only Vonnegut, however, develops this attack-and destroys cycle of the digestive processes into the linchpin association between war and excrement. Once developed, it works on levels ranging from the absolutely ridiculous and juvenile to the totally tragic and extra-linguistic. (Wayne D. McGinnis, pp 200-233)In Slaughterhouse-Five, the rhetoric of violence is the seemingly endless obscenities used to describe the excrement festival. Vonneguts references to filth are so abundant that wardens of the national virtue have often tried to ban Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut himself refers in Palm Sunday to his battles with book-burners in North Dakota; and the Christian Science Monitor reports that a circuit court judge in Oakland County, Michigan ordered that Slaughterhouse-Five be removed from the schools. It is, the judge declared, a degradation of the person of Christ and full of repetitious obscenity and immorality' (681). To enumerate all the references to bodily functions that make up this repetitious obscenity would require that we separate the implied or metaphorical allusions from the overt. The simple fact is that excremental allusions ranging from basic Anglo-Saxon profanities to sophomoric double entendres to complex metaphors dominate the text of Slaughterhouse Five. From the mass, there are four substantive examples to illustrate the development of Vonneguts themes and symbolism: the description of the Tralfamadorian, the prison boxcar scene, the backward move, and the photograph of the girl and pony. (Is this the thesis? YES)Billy Pilgrims description of his alien kidnapers is the indispensable summary passage in the narrative design. It pictorializes the creatures who form the core of Vonneguts satire and who determine Pilgrims peculiar philosophy. (Kathry n Hume, pp 155-178)The initial point to make about the Tralfamadorians is that because they have no concept of death they also have no concept of pain or suffering. Thus they personify pure violence. With a shrug, and dismissing the act with their usual So it goes, they blow the universe to bits without qualms or regrets. Also, these are second generation or second stage Tralfamadorians. In The Sirens of Titan the Tralfamadorians are not peculiarlyshaped and emotionless machines. They are very much like humans. Feeling superior, they invent a machine to do all their low purpose tasks. When the machine reports to them that they have no purpose at all, they therefore start killing each other because they hate things that have no purpose. This irrational, violent demise foreshadows the fate that awaits Earthlings.The two features most striking about the Tralfamadorian are: (1) its likeness to the common household gadget used to unclog toilets, and (2) its exaggerated optic capacity. Th ese are the two characteristics that Vonnegut uses to establish the connection between everyday, ordinary domestic life and imminent violence. Despite this spastic world view, Pilgrim is the typical American. He is a harmless drudge from a dysfunctional family who does his military duty, goes to school, marries the ugly daughter of a wealthy man, fills a respectable job and dreams of escape from the Capitalist rut. When in psychological crisis, therefore, it is fitting that Pilgrim turns not to the crucified Christ whose picture hangs above his bed but to the American values that have caused his crisis. He envisions his savior in the image of an ordinary household device used for loosening excrement and accumulated filth from sewage pipes.Symbolically, this is the same function that the Tralfamadorians perform for Pilgrim: they cleanse the pipes of his perception, unclog his vision by disabusing him of historical, sociological fixations. The parallax view of this function is that Pi lgrim himself is also excrement. He cannot willfully inflict pain upon another human being. Consequently, no matter how benevolent his intentions or how financially successful he becomes; he remains a scrap of human waste sticking in the cultural pipes. Pilgrim cannot alter the social predicament, but thanks to a brain trauma and the Tralfamadorians, he transfers his dilemma to a second dimension. He comes unstuck in time (26), thereby unclogging his own perceptions so that he realizes the negligibility of death, and the true nature of time (169). To realize the true nature of time simply means to quit trying to understand time. That is, by complying in his own status as waste, he frees himself from spatio-temporal reality. He lets go of all intellectual pretense and philosophical biases and drifts into a psychic state where he is untethered to any moral or political codes. He is freed from cultural gravity.In the context of this historical reality, poetic vision is nonsensical. Von negut makes no claim to it and has no faith in it. His narrator self observes ironically that Among the things Billy could not change were the past, the present, and the future (58). Though Pilgrim is truly a seer, unlike the idealistic poets, he fails to convince the populace that he is anything other than a madman.This sight metaphor carries over to the second summary passage: Vonneguts description of the American prisoners in the German boxcars:â€Å"To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language†. (66-678)The boxcar scene shows how our pipes get so clogged. Everything entering the human body or mindfood, language, historyemerges as waste. The shit and piss and language are the ultimate product of all human endeavors. In th e microcosmic confines of the prison car, the men are reduced to their basic biological form: they are consumers and excreters, a collective singular waste-producing organism. They see the world only through occasional cracks in the boxcar door or through the ventilators, a condition paralleling the human tunnel vision that the Tralfamadorians later ridicule. Moreover, the boxcar further shows how human vision is impaired by human waste. The prisoners view the universe through the same apertures that have just been fouled by their own excrement. (Sanford Pinsker, pp 42-66).The direct connection between the boxcar and the beautiful, doomed city is that the sausage eaten by the American prisoners probably comes from the Dresden slaughterhouse. The black bread too later shows up in the kitchen of Schlachthoffà ¼nf, cooked for the Americans by an impatient German war widow (142). In this way the Dresden slaughterhouse produces the excrement that comes out through the boxcar apertures. Dresden epitomizes urban civilization. There the genius of man produced a viable monument to architecture, music, and art, as described by Mary Endell in 1908 (21). That same genius produces the prison trains and the bombs that destroy Dresden. That incineration reduces Dresdens inhabitants to tons of human bone meal (7), a metaphor that returns us to the waste producing example from which we began. The narrative cycle encompassing Dresden and the prison boxcar symbolizes the conflict between the human instinct to violence and the conscious awareness that such violence must be controlled lest the species disappear. It is a lesson, obviously, that humans have not learned.The boxcar scene also symbolizes Slaughterhouse-Five per se. The book itself is part of Vonneguts excrement festival. Vonnegut has consumed hunks and fragments of history, the most indigestible being his experiences in Dresden. He says that he thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden (8), but discovers that he suffers from a creative constipation that remains unrelieved for twenty-three years. In trying to purge Dresden from his memory he recalls a limerick that concludes: And now you wont pee you old fool (8). By tragicomically associating his own inability to write with the inability to urinate, and by expressing his frustration in a bawdy limerick, Vonnegut shows that his novel is the ultimate example of the excremental motif that sustains it. Slaughterhouse Five is, in short, the waste product of Vonneguts illustration of the imagination. Language, whether written or oral, is merely part of the excrement that passes through the mental ventilators. (Thomas Reed Whissen, pp 321-329)The third summary passage exemplifies the war technology implied in the boxcar episode. The scene in which Pilgrim imagines viewing a war movie backward, perhaps more overtly than any other in the novel, shows how closely violence is linked with every trait of the human animal. Vonn egut was not the first to exploit the similarity of bomber. Vonnegut, however, greatly extends the suitable Freudian metaphor. To the bombers defecation he adds the fighter planes spewing bullets in steel ejaculation. Like Freud, whom he satirizes, Vonnegut associates defecation and ejaculation with destructiveness: war, in one way or another, is the collective human response to sexuality and poor toilet training. (William E. K. Meyer Jr, pp 78)In Pilgrims idealistic dream world, however, evil and brutality are removed from the excremental-sexual processes. Pilgrim imagines that the indefinite reversal of the biological functions will terminate in the re-perfection of Adam and Eve, the original apple-eaters, sinners, and waste producers. Appropriately, Pilgrim sees Eves modern counterparts as the ones who eliminate the dangerous contents from the cylinders that suggests both the phallic and the fecal. Pilgrim characteristically misses the point that Eve is the typical mother of evil and that the modern women who now disarm the bombs also produced the soldiers and bombardiers who use the weapons to kill the sons and daughters of other mothers. In Pilgrims defense, however, we have to remember that when he envisions the comforting reversal depicted in the backward movie, he has not yet been re-educated by the Tralfamadorians. The spacemen soon come to flush such romantic sentimentalism (shit, Vonnegut would say) from his mind. They eliminate the myths, old wives tales, and historical-psychological sewage from his thinking. Conventional wisdom judges him insane, but the psychic flushing is nonetheless what frees Pilgrim from his mother, his wife Valencia, his intrusive daughter Barbara, and other daughters of Eve. Once freed, he replaces them with his ideal Eve: Montana Wildhack, a porn queen whore. (Jerome Klinkowitz, pp 77-102)The fourth summary passage is not so much a scene as a recurring emblem. Vonnegut, like Swift with his maps and charts, has a penchant f or graphics. Therefore this fourth instance is another graphic, though one that does not appear literally in the novel but only in the readers interesting imagination. It is the dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony (40). This is the first pornographic photograph in history, having been made in 1841 by Andrà © Le Fà ¨ve, an assistant to Louis Daguerre. Like a bawdy cue card, the photo pops up throughout history and Vonneguts narrative. Le Fà ¨ve defends it as representing mythological couplings. Despite this artistic effort, he is condemned as a pornographer and dies in prison. Roland Weary, in World War II, carries a copy as part of his survival kit. The Germans who capture him steal it. Pilgrim stumbles across another copy in 1968 while investigating a New York porn shop that is appropriately adorned with fly shit on the windows (177).Not only is the photograph a graphic example of absurd and a mocking reminder of what Eves sin has led her daughters to, but it is another link in Vonneguts thematic satire of artistic creation. John Keats urn, for instance, is an unravished bride of quietness and a Sylvan historian that also depicts a scene of seduction from Greek myth. Like the doomed original photographer of the woman-and-pony tableau, Keats ode claims to make a statement about truth and beauty. Vonneguts reoccurring photograph of a willing whore about to be ravished by a horse, however, is a reminder that throughout history love has been the accelerating converter in a waste producing machine. One of the cruelest aspects of the joke implied by the photograph is about poets such as Keats who attempt to understand and transcribe the foolishness of humankind. Love, art, and the general human dilemma are not expressed in pretty sonnets, but in profane poetry such as that sung by the barbershop quartet for Pilgrims father. (Sanford Pinsker, pp 42-66)The ultimate irony underlying the excremental vision is that humans have developed some truly beautiful, inspiring myths and ideas (the Garden of Eden, Heaven, Nirvana, Love, Art). The powerful instinct to violence, however, with all its resultant horrors, has distorted such visions beyond recognition. Little in Vonnegut argues for optimism, but deep in the black mass of his absurdist talent flickers a minute candle of possibility.