![]() ![]() But Dresden and its effects can be felt throughout the text. ![]() ![]() Within its pages, descriptions of the bombing itself total fewer than a thousand words. Nearly a quarter century after it happened, Vonnegut used his Dresden experience as the moral center of Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that brought him wealth and celebrity and his greatest critical acclaim. However, they had been forced into weeks of gruesome corpse recovery, until finally the bodies-too numerous to collect, let alone properly bury-were burned with flamethrowers. “But not me,” Private Vonnegut remarked in a letter several weeks after the bombing. “If we had gone above to take a look” while the attacks were taking place, Vonnegut later wrote, “we would have been turned into artifacts characteristic of the fire storm: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long-ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will.” In between, on February 14, 1945, the captors and their malnourished captives rose from the depths to find that most of the buildings had been leveled and that many thousands of inhabitants had been incinerated. Hundreds more US bombers targeted the city’s infrastructure over the next two days. Fiery, hurricane-force winds roared through buildings, vehicles, and people. More than seven hundred Royal Air Force planes in two nighttime waves had unloaded some fourteen hundred tons of high-explosive bombs and eleven hundred incendiary devices on Dresden. Above, a beautiful German city was destroyed in a spectacular firestorm caused by explosives and incendiaries dropped from British and American aircraft. These are all ideas based off of the major themes of this book such as the futility of war, the numbness and distance it causes to the victims, and the relativity of time.KURT VONNEGUT, age twenty-two, was in a meat locker deep underground with several dozen fellow American prisoners of war, a few guards, and scores of dressed animal cadavers. There is no logical or right answer to this just like there is no answer to the tragedies of war that Billy has experienced. The fact that it is a question is peculiar, however this could suggest that there needs to be an answer. It could symbolize all the beauty in this world that is overshadowed by the violence in human nature. Perhaps the soft, sweet sound of bird chirping could contrast the atrocities Billy has just been freed from after the war was over. This could mean absolutely nothing but there is probably some deeper meaning that Vonnegut is trying to say here. As he is walking around as a free man, he hears birds singing to him. A huge weight has been lifted off his chest. Billy has just been freed from the chains of wartime and violence. Po-tee-weet, the last word of this book, is a pretty famous one and is a major symbol in this book. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet? There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind… Birds were talking. One morning the stable is unlocked and the prisoners are free to go, marking the true end to the war.īilly and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. They are locked up in a stable in the suburbs. In the spring, cremation of the bodies stop when the soldiers leave the prisoners and go to fight the Russians. He is cremating the bodies of all the dead people that lay buried in rubble and ruins. He believes war is bad and can do all this bad stuff, evident throughout the entire story, but at the end of the day one must look at the positive side too.īilly travels back to the time after war has ended. I think this is showing what Vonnegut is trying to say. Billy is thinking positively about his life. One of these positive memories of his life he looks back on is the trip to Dresden with O’Hare a few decades after the war.Vonnegut decides to change up Billy’s mindset for once. Still- if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.”īilly is reflecting back on his life and seeing the good in an overall bad situation. If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. ![]()
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