Slaughter House-Five Chapter 9&10

In the two final chapters of Slaughter House Five, I finally knew that what I had said at my beginning entries was true. In my personal opinion, Billy Pilgrim was very traumatized after the war and he became insane. So much indeed, that he related things he had read in science fiction by his friend Kilgore Trout, with his own life, as if he had lived them as in the books. This is the response to the questions I had posted before about Trout. His importance was the one I suspected. The science fiction was the responsible for Billy’s hallucination, and therefore the creator of the theme in the narrator’s book about Billy.

The narrator was clearly one of Billy’s companions in the war, who remembered everything and wanted to exaggerate Billy’s life to be able to make some money for his family. Finally, the intentions of Vonnegut, as the author of this novel, was to show the world, not only some cruelties of war, but their effect one people. Also he wanted to use science fiction as an innovative genre so that the next generations, such as us, would give it the importance of studying it.

As I had mentioned before, Vonnegut has certain resentment to Americans as well as he has towards Germans. In the ninth chapter, we can see how he argues that Dresden, had to take place because of the horrible events in Japan, by quoting Harry Truman: “We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.”(186)

To be able to poof that Billy was insane, Vonnegut begins to show us in the following citations, how Billy relates what he has seen with what really happened:
“… he had read it before in the veterans hospital. It was about an Earthling man and a woman who were kidnapped by extraterrestrials. They were put on display on a zoo on a planet called Zircon 212.”(201) This relates directly to Billy and Montana being displayed in the zoo of Tralfamadore with the science fiction novels.
“Another Kilgore Trout book there in the window was about a man who built a time machine …”(202) Here we can see the connection between Billy traveling in time and science fiction.
“It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse…”(205) In this quote Billy shows how he has related that disturbing picture with a friend at war by imagining he was the only one who had it, to be bale to make him special, and be able to remember him.
Finally I found the same text that had appeared in the beginning of the novel, which I had commented on one of my previous entries. This is a very spiritual text that also appears in a Lockhart that Montana has. It is so special to Billy that he imagines Montana wearing it so that he may remember her as someone special too. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.”

With this I resume my commentary on this novel. I have to say that when I began to read it, I thought that it was another baring anti war book, but now I have come to realize that I had never explored this science fiction genre, and that it isn’t as bad at all. The details surprised me, and the structure was very well written, so much, that it kept me intrigued all the way.