Slaughterhouse - Five Reading Blog: Chapters 7 and 8

Much is talked about during these two chapters. Vonnegut takes us to many places, including the day in which Dresden was bombed. "It was like the moon" (pg. 179), this is the way in which Dresden is described after the bombing. Even though some people think this novel is not about war, I believe it is. I noticed that the way in which the Dresden massacre is described is showing that the author really does want the readers to know how violent the human race really is. This can be related to Gulliver's Travels, where Jonathan Swift describes horses as the leading race called Houyhnhnms, and the human race as servants called yahoos. In one part a Houyhnhnm tells a Yahoo that the rest of his race is a very violent and primitive one. In this, I think these two stories are related.

I recall a specific part during the eight chapter that stood out to me. Earlier in the novel I was wondering whether dogs would be important in the book. On page 168 Billy Pilgrim is talking to Kilgore Trout, the science fiction writer that he just met. Here it is said that Trout is "scared to death of dogs" and this answers my question. Dogs don't have a huge impact on the novel, however, they are linked to an important character, Kilgore Trout. I think Kilgore will be very important later on in Slaughterhouse because he will probably be the only person, or one of the few people that will believe Billy about his time - traveling.

Towards the end of the novel I will still expect Montana to have a bigger role in the story. She rarely appeared during these two chapters because Billy never time travelled to Traflmadore, but the short moment she came into the story she was pregnant with a baby assumed to be Billy's. Another interesting fact about these chapters is that I found out Billy does nothing to change what happens in his life. For example the day he got on a plane for working purposes, he knew the plane would crash and most of his working peers would die, but he did nothing about it. He thinks people will call him crazy, and he is scared, so he doesn't say a word: "Billy Pilgrim got onto a charted plane in Ilium twenty - five years after that. He knew the plane would crash, but he didn't want to make a fool of himself by saying so." I don't agree on what Billy is doing because he could possibly prevent the death of many people such as those optometrists on the plane, or thousands of people in Dresden.