For the most part, Crusoe’s island serves as a temptationless model of the Weberian ethic, where Crusoe exemplifies how capitalism allows men to work towards their individual prosperity and spiritual salvation. However, society is not a perfect Weberian construct, and Defoe’s world beyond the island acknowledges how capitalism does not always follow Weber’s path to salvation. Nevertheless, Defoe supports capitalism as a system that encourages industry, even as he disdains the mindless acquisition of wealth. Crusoe’s character illustrates how capitalism, like any path to salvation, can be twisted into a justification for the sins of the wicked. 
Defoe asserts through Crusoe’s dichotomous nature that capitalism fosters the Protestant work ethic despite the fallible nature of humanity. The inconsistencies of men such as Crusoe cause them to exalt money while reviling it as a “drug” and to climb to Heaven while falling the other way. Defoe views capitalism not as the cure-all Weber prescribes but as the worst economic system except for all others that have been tried.

Kurt Vonnegut, having witnessed the firebombing of Dresden when he was an infantry scout in the Second World War, wrote Slaughterhouse-Five as a testament to the horrors and incomprehensibility of war. Although the story is based on Vonnegut’s experiences, it is told with layers of abstraction, through the eyes of a young, naïve soldier named Billy Pilgrim. Through Vonnegut’s dark humor, the reader is presented with Billy Pilgrim’s view of the war, inevitable and unstoppable, while simultaneously asked to consider the alternative viewpoint, that war can be ended through the courage of human beings. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut argues against the weak Billy Pilgrim’s mantra of determinism in order to posit the ideal that humanity can create for itself a future without war.
The context of Slaughterhouse-Five can be traced back to Vonnegut’s service in World War II and his chilling experiences on the front lines of warfare. At times, events in the novel seem not very far removed from the reality of history. For instance, a direct comparison can be drawn between Billy’s imprisonment by the Germans and Vonnegut’s term as an American prisoner of war in an underground factory, the eponymous “Slaughterhouse-Five.” During his imprisonment at Dresden, Vonnegut witnessed the Allied forces’ bombing of the city, which wiped out perhaps more people than the atomic bomb did in Hiroshima. The fire-bombing of Dresden, the “Florence of the Elbe,” made Vonnegut question whether the atrocities of war could ever be justified. It would take him two decades before he could muster the strength to recount the tragedy of Dresden in a novel. At the time that Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, another war was raging—the Vietnam War. Thus, the novel is also targeted to Americans who idly stood by as young Americans left for Vietnam, never to come back home. It serves as a reminder to Americans that they have the power to prevent history from repeating itself.
