Slaughter-House Five Chapter 5 Pgs 119-135

In this chapter Billy jumps a lot in time to 3 different moments: His stay in Tralfamador, His life in 1968 and WWII. In the end of chapter five we continue to see a lot of examples of death ending up in "so it goes." which is something I have pointed out in most of my blogs and have seen in all the chapters of this book. "Billy asked them a little about themselves, learned that the boy’s father had been killed in Vietnam- in the famous five-day battle for hill 875 near Dakto. So it goes." (Pgs 134-135) Vonnegut shows no pity towards those who lose a close member of the family, maybe because of the way that he through Billy’s eyes sees death just as a moment. The person is still alive in thousands of happy moments.

The author of the book comes into the story as one of the characters, which is very interesting to my point of view. It’s something I had never seen before. “An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, "There they go, there they go." He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." (pg 125) I had never read a novel in which the author mentioned himself in the writing, which was the reason why it seemed so strange.

When Billy is a prisoner of war it reminds me of a game I play that is called Dungeons and Dragons because even though the game is played in a very different time and context, I had a mission/quest, in which I started of prisoner from a previous battle and had to escape. Billy’s situation was in a way very similar because he lacked good food, he had no good equipment and he was very hurt in his whole body, this was the same with my game´s character only that I had no help from others like Billy did from the Englishmen. It’s very strange how these two very different things come to link in my mind but it’s very nice that the author has this ability to make you think on many different things.