Slaughterhouse-five Ch6: Ishmael’s Teachings Taught Again

The two things that most impacted me on this chapter was the nature of human kind. Human kind has always and will always make errors that will eternally mark the world. For example a war does never go by unnoticed. After a war there are always a series of chain reactions after the war that affects the whole world. Maybe Vonnegut's intention on making his book have as main event the Second World War is to show the good and the bad sides of war. Vonnegut does a perfect balance of how he presents to us the war because he says it is bad and that a massacre has no right way of describing but he also includes humor and events where you can see a good aspect of war. It is not that he shows that war is all peace and fun but he does show the light in the end of the tunnel. A think that I really liked about how Vonnegut develops this novel is that he is always changing from past to present to future but he does it with a reason. He might be doing this to show the contrast and the changes that Billy had during and after the war. Human beings never stop changing and after an event such as a war they will change even more. Vonnegut makes this time changes with the intention to see that Billy has evolved from what he was before and during the war to the person that communicates with Tralfamadorians in the future. Returning to the nature of human kind I found a maxim that states exactly what people sometimes think and live for. "Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is-"said Lazzaro, "it's revenge" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 139). The thing that most hit me was when Lazzaro said this. It most impacted me because he is right we as human beings like revenge and the feeling of overpowering a person that has made you feel bad or that has beaten you. We human beings are very selfish and never want to be beaten or worse than someone. When all of a sudden someone corrects or beats you it is like the bubble of your ego has been popped. After this you feel that the only way to blow it up again is to do the same thing that person did to you. This book might be trying to show us that all that greed and that feeling of being superior has led us to many wars and terrible events. After reading partway through the chapter Billy says to his audience: "If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 142). This reminded me a lot of what Ishmael was trying to teach us. Ishmael wanted to make humankind understand that death was not so bad and if you have lived a life you wanted without the pressures of mother culture. Billy Pilgrim has also gotten this idea from the Tralfamadorians that we are dead in one moment but we know that in on another time being past or future we will be alive. Vonnegut might have included these thoughts in his book to help us understand that if we keep on making the same mistakes we will keep going on a failed flying machine like Ishmael said. Vonnegut might be using as a theme war to show that his crash of the plane would be when wars unleash without any control between all countries.