Entry 1, Chapter 1 - Motivation

     Motivating an audience is key to illustrating an overall picture as to why you even decided to write a peice of literature. Most authors choose to write about subjects that hit close to home. If one was from New York during 9/11, then producing a fictional story about a man who lost his life during the attack makes complete sense. Kurt Vonnegut openly informs his audience in the first part of the first chapter that he was writing this book to simply recall his stories during World War II and especially Dresden. Later on in the first chapter, Vonnegut visits his old war chum, Bernard V. O'Hare in order to gain some more insight on the stories that his own mind has forgotten. As his visit with O'Hare goes on, O'Hare's wife, Mary, finally expresses her dissapproval of the making of this book Vonnegut was composing because Mary strongly felt that the media such as books and movies were encouraging the idea that war is great and that young men fighting in these wars will mature from young, immature boys to strong-willed and mature men. Blunt in anger, Mary explains that,"you'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs,"because in her mind the boys who go off to war are basically babies like her small children playing in upstairs bedrooms and that wars send these "babies" off to combat to witness and fight in and for something they barely can comprehend and are too weak-minded to witness. Vonnegut says that he wants to dedicate the book he was composing to Mary because of her sensible stands on the fact that war is not something to be applauded and praised, but something that needs to be explained first-hand and in a way for people to really see the brutality of war in a different way than the way that the media makes it appear. Building upon his formed opinion from not only his eyewitness accounts of the war, but along with the emotional opinions of families, Vonnegut uses personal and nonpersonal opinions to anchor his motivation to write his book in a way that shows people the real side of war and not just the side the media puts out that expresses praise for war.