Morality Of The Youth In Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five

Youth are the preeminent guiding force for change today in society. They inspire innovation, aspire to influence the world, fight for those without a voice, and are tomorrow’s legislators. Throughout all modern time, the youth of all nations believe in something larger than themselves and something which will change everything known. In the current civilization that goal is equality, both of the genders and of the races. Kurt Vonnegut writes about the youth in Slaughterhouse-Five and their mission. Yet these motivational sources differ a large amount from those of the current day. Their task, war. The youth in Vonnegut’s novel are naive children, sheep following their shepherd. Without these misguided young adults, the machinery of war†¦show more content†¦While talking he realizes â€Å"You know--we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babie s. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. ‘My God, my God--’ I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade’† (Vonnegut, 135). In this quote, Vonnegut comes to the realization that â€Å"babies† fight wars, not the aging men he and the public believes fights them. A less common known name of Slaughterhouse-Five is The Children’s Crusade which is an unambiguous critique on the age of those who make up the war effort. Not only are these infantrymen children, they are bamboozled and scammed into enlisting. Vonnegut harkens this back to a completely different war, the Children’s Crusade. In the first chapter the reader learns of it when he writes â€Å"Mackay told us that the Children’s Crusade started in 1213 when two monks got the idea of raising armies of children in Germany and France and selling the in North Africa as slaves. Thirty thousand children volunteered, thinking they were going to P alestine† (Vonnegut, 20). This is a straightforward commentary on his part in the war he and the protagonist of his novel, Pilgrim, were involved in. Vonnegut is correlating the Childrens Crusade to WW2 and in doing so providing his assessment on the driving force behind the war efforts. In her writings on