Kilgore Trout

Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, the author Kilgore Trout is referenced repeatedly. He is used to make interesting analogies to reality. Although he is never cited due to his “terrible prose”, his story ideas are regarded as very great. In Chapter 8, the plot of two of his stories are cited. The first was “a book about a money tree . . . it attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.” The second was a book called The Gutless Wonder, a story about a very humanlike robot who was judged more for his “unforgiveable” halitosis than his job as a mass murderer of humans.

The purpose of Kilgore Trout is to show Vonnegut’s opinions through colorful parables without having to use any prose. The story about the money tree is very plainly about how money corrupts people to kill each other, while the only one who truly profits is the money itself. The Gutless Wonder’s purpose is to satirize how the human race can find something as inoffensive as bad breath as a larger evil than cold-blooded mass murder. Vonnegut was known to vehemently oppose war, and Trout allows him to indirectly insert himself into the story (although he does appear for humorous purposes in a few places in the story).