Entry #20: No, It Doesn't Go



Don't worry, Kurt. You've succeeded

The final chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five holds mixed feelings for me. In a way, it does bring together all the different parts of the book, even though Vonnegut's goal of the book was to write a story in the Tralfamadore fashion.

Vonnegut comes back into the light of the storyline for brief moments before he ends the novel; something I felt to be rather comforting. I like him more than Billy Pilgrim. He establishes his visit with O'Hare to Dresden; meanwhile Billy Pilgrim begins the excavation to find the victims of the fire bombing with all the other prisoners of war. The prisoners dug, bodies were found, Pilgrim's digging mate died, and Vonnegut even managed to stick in one more allusion to my favorite computer virus: Mustard gas and roses.

No Sam, Billy Pilgrim is broken forever.

"But then the bodies rotted and liquified, and the stink was like mustard gas and roses." Despite all of this literary masterpiece, I couldn't help but be the slightest bit paranoid that they were going to dig up Stanley Yelnats's treasure. But I digress. In my opinion, the contrast between Vonnegut's return to Dresden and Billy Pilgrim's return to search for the bodies of the innocent killed by war reflect how Vonnegut never truly left that war. Despite how much of a satirist and pacifist that man is, he is still haunted by the bodies of the innocent, just as Billy Pilgrim was.
Vonnegut meant for the theme of his novel to be to learn to deal with life like Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim learned how live life in a "So it goes" fashion, and through that, he found that life was nothing to be taken seriously or lightly, because anything that is, was, or will be will never change. It never has. He learned that any action taken will be/has always been the action taken, so there is no reason to dwell on the bad things in life. Simply ignore the bad, and live an eternity in the pleasant; such as a time when everything as beautiful, and nothing hurt.
In the last paragraph, when Billy had learned that the war was over in Europe, he wandered out into the shady street that was occupied by nothing but the deathly wagon that brought them there. He always knew how the war ended, how he was born, and how his life would end. In a similar way, Vonnegut trains the reader in that same fashion by telling them the beginning and end of the novel before it had even begun. The novel began with "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time." Throughout the novel, his anti-war ideals are introduced, and he tells the reader that even after a massacre, there is nothing left but for a bird to ask, "Poo-tee-weet?"
The novel ends with the war ending, after the massacre of millions. It ends just as Vonnegut told us it would:

"One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?'"