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.