Slaughterhouse Five Pastiche and Metafiction: Essay

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The best evidence for this suffusion in the author's own life is in the final chapter, when the main character/author returns in full force. Traveling peacefully and happily in a plane above Berlin, during a moment he considers "one of the nicest ones in recent times" (Vonnegut, p. 211), removed in time and space from Dresden, Vonnegut "imagined dropping bombs on those lights, those villages and cities and towns," (Vonnegut, p. 211).

The best evidence for the author's failure to reconcile, for the negative answer to the plot's central question, comes earlier in the same passage and needs little exegetic:

If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadoreans is true, that we will live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still -- if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice, (Vonnegut, p. 211). But one word then, visiting the nice moments -- denying Dresden -- is the only way the author knows to reconcile, and it too, if his canvas of cynicism and misanthropy may be considered, has not proven wholly effective.

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Perhaps the best answer to the question, though, is not "no" exactly, so much as "Poo-tee-weet."

…there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre… Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet… (Vonnegut, p.19).

Yet, all is not quiet here, for not everybody did die. Vonnegut lived and with him Dresden, which has reached backwards and forwards across the author's life to silence him on the topic for twenty four long years until, ultimately, he produces Slaughterhouse Five, an un-authoritative -- "Poo-tee-weet" -- work of reporting and fictionalization. Vonnegut believed some 130,000 people had died in the fire, today's estimates say something like 32,000. So it goes......

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