Slaughterhouse-five Ch 10: The Mysteries Revealed

As I read the last chapter of Slaughterhouse-five I expected many questions that I still had to be answered. One of my biggest questions was who was Billy and who the narrator was. As the book describes how Vonnegut and O'Hare were returning from Dresden Vonnegut says: "Billy and the rest were being marched into the ruins by the guards. I was there. O´Hare was there."(212). Finally after all these questions while reading the book they help us see who the narrator was. There are two narrators who are Vonnegut and Billy. Vonnegut is the one that tells the story of Billy and is the one that knows the past, present, and future. Billy Pilgrim is a friend of Vonnegut that lived the war with him. Vonnegut is narrating the story of Billy and the one who is able to do the time traveling is the imagination of Billy. It is as if Billy had told the story to Vonnegut and Vonnegut wrote the story of what happened to Billy that was at the same time what was happening to him. Vonnegut wanted us to be kind of confused throughout the book on the time in which Billy was and who was the narrator because he might be trying to show us how their lives were in war. The change of narrator may be seen as if there was no certain order in the book. War is meant to be structured actions but many things may happen in the battle field and it becomes chaos. The time traveling can be the spare time that the prisoners of war had during the war to be able to think about themselves and their future. The time travels were in Billy´s mind from past to future but he never really talked about the present. This might be a tool Vonnegut used to write his book because it is like filling the blank spaces but not targeting to fill the space where he is telling the story from. Finally, all the future and past events happen and we end up in the present that is the middle of the story

While reading this last chapter I also came across the mention of religion by Tralfamadorians and their way of life. According to Billy Pilgrim: "On Tralfamadore… There isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind…is Charles Darwin" (210). Religion to the Tralfamadorians is based on science. Darwin is known for the theory of evolution and that we will always die and next generation will be better. Evolution is a word that I really like because it is a circle that will never stop. Every time we learn new things as human beings and each time a new generation comes they have no other choice than to improve what was done by past generations. Jesus Christ is the form of religion where everything is faith. Faith is a topic I have mentioned in my past blog called God According To Vonnegut
and is always a symbol of religion.
The belief of the Tralfamadorians is that they believe in science over belief because Darwin is a scientific theory and Jesus Christ is a spiritual theory. The Tralfamadorian way of thinking is very different from the human way of thinking because it says that when a person is dead they do not feel pity for him because in another moment in his life he was alive. The human belief of death is that when a person is dead he is gone forever until the afterlife. Kurt Vonnegut might have done the Tralfamadorians as a superior race that know everything better than us and are trying to help Billy understand the correct way of living. When Vonnegut was returning from Dresden he passed through East Germany and said: "I imagined dropping bombs on those lights, those villages and cities and towns" (211). This is one of the ironical things Vonnegut does because Vonnegut is person that has lived the bombing in the floor with all the destruction happening around him. He has lived that hell that was being bombed but now he has the intention of bombing and making other people suffer as he did. I think this also shows how we as human beings sometimes let our thirst for revenge overpower our common sense.