Earnest Hemmingway once said: "Never think that war, however necessary and justified, is not a crime." (Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference) War is a horrible and tragic thing and affects people differently. Vonnegut and Hemmingway discuss this idea in their novels A Farewell to Arms and Slaughterhouse Five. Both novels deal not only with war stories but also with other genres, whether a science fiction story in Vonnegut's case or a love story in Hemingway's. . Despite all the similarities, there are also very big differences in the depiction of war and how the two characters deal with their shocking and different experiences. It's how someone deals with these tragedies that is the real story. This essay will evaluate how the main characters in the two novels deal with their experiences in different ways. Slaughterhouse Five presents a thoughtful and compassionate analysis of Billy's response to the cruelty of life and war. This cruelty comes from death, time, renewal, war and the lack of compassion for human life, all major themes of the novel which attempt to solve once and for all the great mystery of death. Billy lets himself be governed by chance. and when his time travels begin, he does nothing to try to control when they happen or where they go. Billy knows the Tralfamadorians are coming, but does nothing to stop them and goes with them freely. Billy saw a "Tralfamadore flying saucer, sailing through both space and time, thus seeming to Billy Pilgrim to have come from nowhere all at once" (Vonnegut 95). These feelings remained with Billy throughout the many strange events of his life. While still a child in the eyes of society, Billy was sent to fight World War II in Europe. There it is... in the middle of a paper...... of their environment, whether it's time travel or love. Throughout the novels, Pilgrim and Henry are alone in their minds while they are constantly surrounded by people. They couldn't escape the war no matter what they did, and it will always be with them, whether in their minds or in their minds. So it goes. Works Cited Glasser, William A. “A Farewell to Arms.” The Sewannee Review 2nd ser. 74 (1966): 453-69. JSTOR. Internet. December 9, 2013. .Harris, Charles B. “Time, Uncertainty, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Reading of Slaughterhouse-Five.” The Centenary Review 3rd ser. 20 (1976): 228-42. Web. Hemingway, Ernest. A farewell to arms. New York: Scribner Classics, 1997. Print.Trogdon, Robert W. Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Print. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse 5. Np: Dial Trade Paperback, 2009. Printed.