More To Come

In class we had a very interesting discussion about who was Billy Pilgrim. We all shared our ideas and a few conclusions came up. I suggested that maybe Vonnegut was another soldier in the war that knew Billy. When reading chapter 5 I discovered the answer. When Billy was in the hospital he meets Vonnegut “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” (Vonnegut, Chapter 5) As I read this I felt a shock run through my body. We would have had the answer to the discussion without having to think about it. His appearance in the book was so sudden and unexpected that I had to read that part several times. Why would Vonnegut enter the book and give himself such a secondary role? In order to understand this better I decided to look into his background. I found out that he had fought in WWII for the United States and was captured by the Germans. He was then sent to Dresden where he presence the bombing of the city. He was then sent to a underground meat locker called Slaughterhouse Five. In 1945 he was freed by the Red army and received a Purple Heart. This is a little part of Vonnegut’s life, which has helped me understand who the narrator is and why he is telling that story. He lived what Billy is going through and I can assume that in a short period of time Billy will presence the bombing of Dresden and be sent to a meat locker.

The question of Billy’s origins still remains. We already know that Vonnegut not only acts as the narrator but as a character. What then is Billy? What comes to my mind is that he is the part of Vonnegut that was invented to stress a point. He is the tool that enables the author to transmit the message onto the reader. This also explains why Vonnegut was only mentioned once. Billy will tell his story and Vonnegut will tell his. They are just two people who meet. The travel of Billy through time is something that the author could not include if this were his story. A lot has been answered in this chapter and there is still more to come.