“The two scouts who had ditched Billy and Weary had just
been shot…They had been discovered and shot from behind. Now they were dying in
the snow, feeling nothing, turning the snow into the color of raspberry sherbet.
So it goes” (Vonnegut 54).
The strong language describing the death of the two American
scouts provides a solid example of Vonnegut’s intriguing imagery. Blood on
snow, conspicuous in the freshly-blanketed German forest, seeped around the
quiet, numb and dying soldiers who were “feeling nothing.” Vonnegut could have
just mentioned their deaths, but he chose to write in vivid and gruesome imagery
by saying the snow around them turned “the color of raspberry sherbet.” Evoking
naïve and pleasant childhood memories of a cold delicacy of summertime, he
contrasts the harsh brutality of war with the soft, frosty delight of a more
peaceful time. Perhaps reinforcing the aimlessness of violence in WWII, he
reminds his audience that bloodshed not only stains nature’s pure white
innocence with the scarlet color of a child’s treat, but also stains the
innocence of the human race which has been corrupted by war.
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