Ben Bontrager’s Reviews > Slaughterhouse-Five > Status Update

The mouse is a metaphor for Barbara. She doesn’t realize that the damage she’s doing. By demeaning Billy, she’s worsening his PTSD symptoms.

Deliberate sin or biology?

Billy is trying to tell the boy that memories often feel as vivid and real as the present.

Billy is clearly not satisfied with the aliens’ advice to ignore the bad and accept suffering. Billy wants to keep living and pursue the good. He wants agency. It seems that his PTSD is preventing him from doing so.

His time in the zoo demonstrates life without suffering as being meaningless and just as bad as life on Earth with suffering.

The Tralfamadorians are comfortable with a lack of explanation and agency. To believe in agency is to believe that the bug can escape the amber and escape suffering. But any attempt to rationalize suffering is unheard of to them.

Hobo is now representing denial. And the amber and bug analogy being people trapped in suffering without explanation. Weary is attempting to find a why, but is wrong.

Once again showing how ridiculous status is as a concept. The contrasting conditions of the Germans car compared to the Americans paired with Billy (who later would be rich and respected) spooning with a hobo and dumping shit out of helmet.

I imagine that Billy crying for no reason is an example of the PTSD that Vonnegut felt.

Every time Vonnegut breaks the forth wall, it’s a reminder that Billy Pilgrim is rooted in his own story. He constantly plays with this idea of fiction and reality that leaves me guessing.

For a former POW, painting a German soldier as innocent and beautiful as Eve (but not Adam?) shows that he’s trying to humanize the Germans while also showing that they’re capable of grave sin.

The rabbi who’d been shot through the hand is clearly a Christ figure. He’s giving Billy a place to rest.

Once again, he’s using irony to show that Weary isn’t nearly as noble as he thinks he is. Billy is laughing because he thinks he’s finally going to get the one thing he wants most… death, but then the German’s (who are supposed to be the villains) save him from his own demise. A hero one minute and a villain the next and vice versa.