Epilogue

This is my final blog entry. So it goes. I'll use this blog entry to make some closing remarks on the story of Slaughterhouse-Five.

The last chapter opens with Vonnegut describing the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the carnage taking place in Vietnam at the time, and the death of Vonnegut's father. So it goes. These are used to nail in one of the story's main purposes, showing how widespread death is, and how some people just don't care. King and Kennedy were both mourned by the nation; Vonnegut's father by his family; and those in Vietnam scarcely by anyone.

On a side note, Vonnegut says of his father "He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust." This short passage serves to show Vonnegut's anti-war views.

The second and third paragraphs compare alien cultures described by Pilgrim and Trout. On Tralfamadore, the aliens state that they have a greater interest in Darwin's philosophy that corpses are improvements than Jesus' philosophy that death can be overcome. When describing Trout, Vonnegut makes a humorous juxtaposition of the alien's interest in both Darwin and golf, an odd pairing, although it would make sense for alien cultures to have a different sense of importance.

Next, the trip to Dresden undertaken by Vonnegut and his old war buddy O'Hare is described. It is seemingly a rather trivial passage. However, two parts are important. One describes Vonnegut mentally reliving his experience in the bombing of Dresden while staring down at the modern city from his airplane seat. This passage provides a dark tone to the passage. The next describes O'Hare's finding of the world's population growth and death rates. After reading it, Vonnegut remarks dryly "I suppose they will all want dignity." He says this not because he does not believe that they should have dignity, but because through his own experiences he has found that the world's leaders appear to not believe there is enough dignity to go around.

The final part of the chapter describes Pilgrim's experiences after the bombing. He and a Maori are made to dig holes for corpses. The Maori dies of dry heaving after smelling the rotting bodies. So it goes. Due to his death, the Germans decide on a new strategy of immolating the corpses with flamethrowers. So it goes. Meanwhile, in another part of the city, poor old Edgar Derby is found with a stolen teapot. Even in the face of a horrendous massacre, the Germans still take time to shoot him. So it goes. Finally, at the end of WWII, Pilgrim steps outside his stable, alone in Dresden. Only the birds are there to speak to him. The book ends on the bird asking the unanswerable and incomprehensible question of "Poo-tee-weet?"As Vonnegut himself once said, "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre."

So It Goes

Throughout all of Slaughterhouse-Five, and especially in chapter 10, the phrase "so it goes" is used to describe death. Whenever a character, no matter how small or large, dies, the only remark made of his or her death is the story's infamous understatement, "so it goes". The meaning of the refrain can be taken as the obvious Tralfamadorian view of the book, or applied to reality in either a cynical or fatalist fashion. The cynical view would be that Vonnegut does not care about death, that we are all so small and insignificant that none of us is worthy of anything more than 3 words to mark our death, no matter what we did in life. The fatalist view is simply that death happens. Nothing can be done to avoid death, and thus we need not worry about mortality, as it is inevitable and there should be more time spent enjoying life than attempting to prolong it.

She Was a Heavenly Azure

In chapter 9, Billy Pilgrim's dull, plain, unattractive, obese wife whom who loves dearly yet is very distant from, Valencia Merble, dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Billy's reaction is typical to his reaction to all the tragedies in his life; "So it goes". Slaughterhouse-Five includes fatalism as a constant theme. Fatalism is a philosophical belief that the past, present, and future are all set in stone, and thus attempting to change things is futile. Fatalists will normally choose to just "go with the flow" when it comes to life. After all, if it's impossible to change something, why bother? This perfectly describes Billy Pilgrim. Even after the firebombing of Dresden, the execution of poor Edgar Derby and the accidental death of his wife, he's still pretty much alright with everything.

Rumfoord

In chapter 9, the only form of direct characterization other than Billy's passivity is used. The other man in Pilgrim's hospital room, Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, is described as "a hateful old man, conceited and cruel. He often said to the [hospital staff], in one way or another, that people who were weak deserved to die." The reason direct characterization is not used in the book is simply because Vonnegut did not view characters as important to the story. They were "machines", in a very Tralfamadorian sense. Vonnegut uses characters simply as pawns in his story. They exist simply to serve a purpose, allowing Vonnegut to explain his views and recount his war experiences in a narrative form.

Kilgore Trout

Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, the author Kilgore Trout is referenced repeatedly. He is used to make interesting analogies to reality. Although he is never cited due to his “terrible prose”, his story ideas are regarded as very great. In Chapter 8, the plot of two of his stories are cited. The first was “a book about a money tree . . . it attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.” The second was a book called The Gutless Wonder, a story about a very humanlike robot who was judged more for his “unforgiveable” halitosis than his job as a mass murderer of humans.

The purpose of Kilgore Trout is to show Vonnegut’s opinions through colorful parables without having to use any prose. The story about the money tree is very plainly about how money corrupts people to kill each other, while the only one who truly profits is the money itself. The Gutless Wonder’s purpose is to satirize how the human race can find something as inoffensive as bad breath as a larger evil than cold-blooded mass murder. Vonnegut was known to vehemently oppose war, and Trout allows him to indirectly insert himself into the story (although he does appear for humorous purposes in a few places in the story).

The Barbershop Quartet

In Chapter 8, Billy Pilgrim falls to an odd kind of foreshadowing. Although the reader already knows of the plane crash, Pilgrim does not. However, while he is at his and Valencia’s anniversary party, the barbershop quartet that performs on his airplane sings. Their singing causes him to become incredibly uncomfortable, foreshadowing the plane crash. However, Pilgrim still does not know of the crash in that particular moment in time, while the reader does, creating dramatic irony. This is inserted into the story in order to show that Pilgrim did not always possess the ability to see through time directly, although he was able to foreshadow disaster indirectly.

Absurdity

At several points in Chapter 7, Vonnegut will briefly go completely off topic to make a note about a seemingly trivial detail. For instance, after singing a rather vulgar song about Polish people, Vonnegut writes “speaking of people from Poland: . . .” and then goes on to explain the hanging of a Polish man being hanged in Dresden, despite having nothing to do with the airplane scene. In a similar vein, it is later pointed out that Billy Pilgrim and Werner Gluck, a young, weak, scrawny German guard, “were, in fact, distant cousins, something they never found out.” The purpose of these random notes could be explained in two ways. The first is that simply Vonnegut was simply writing his stream-of-thought, regardless of the relevancy of his remarks. The second is Vonnegut trying to enhance his absurdist tone taken throughout the book.