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

Americans are trying to kill everyone and shooting at American POWs. This is contrasted by the Germans extending mercy and kindness towards the POWs.

Death isn’t to be romanticized or feared

More pain doesn’t solve past pain

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.

Rewritten and misinterpreted gospels to show how subjective the man-made definitions of worthy of death and worthy of life are.

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.