Slaugherhouse Five
The use of the colours blue and ivory- which are very cold and unpleasant colours- demonstrate the relativity of mishaps and in specific, death. Vonnegut first uses these symbols when Billy is almost abducted by the flying saucer, and his feet are described as blue and ivory. The two colours also were used to describe the corpses “with bare feet.” The two colours are used to depict the small gap between life and death. The colours are used to describe the feet of both alive Billy and the dead corpses, showing similarity and the unknowingness of when one will die.
Blue and Ivory
Blue and Ivory
Orange and Black
These two colours are used severally to depict a lot of different things. First, the POW trains have a black and orange banner, then as a festive symbol on the tents in Pilgrim’s daughter’s wedding. Used upon many occasion, the colours depict the connectedness of everything through the past and present, positive and negative.
He was barefoot, and still in his pajamas and a bathrobe, though it was late afternoon. His bare feet were blue and ivory
There was so much to see-dragon's teeth, killing machine, corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory
Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, selfcrucified, holding himself there with a blue and ivory claw hooked over the sill of the ventilator.
Somebody had taken his boots. His bare feet were blue and ivory. It was all right, somehow, his being dead.
The locomotive and the last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for airplanes that it was carrying prisoners of war.
The wedding had taken place that afternoon in a gaily striped tent in Billy's backyard. The stripes were orange and black.
Violet
Used to depict death as nothing more but violet light a hum, the reader is open to a lot of interpretation. Personally, I perceived the use of the colour violet as a way to convey Kurt Vonnegut (as well as thousands others) opinion of death. Death is something that many think is a mysterious and strange concept. It is therefore appropriate that Vonnegut associates it to an unusual colour of light.
The light is not white- it is not bright- but it is not black, which makes violet a more comforting colour to represent that death is not too harsh or frightening of a situation.
His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn't anybody else there, or any thing. There was just violet light and a hum.
So Billy experiences death for a while. It is simply violet light and a hum. There isn't anybody else there.
