welcome to the introductory lecture on slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt vonet to begin our discussion I would like to read a passage from a review of the book published in 1969 a review that came out shortly after the book itself it is written by Michael kryon and appears in the new Republic vaget writes about the most excruciatingly painful things his novels have attacked our deepest fears of Automation and the bomb our deepest political guilt our fiercest hatreds and loves nobody else writes books on these subjects they are inaccessible to normal novelistic approaches but vaget armed with his schizophrenia takes an absurd distorted wildly funny framework which is ultimately an aesthetic and here in 1969 Michael kryon correctly diagnoses one of the things that's going to qualitatively separates slh house 5 from all the books that um preced in the American Cannon before it even if you take look at the most widely read books in the American Canon such as the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby or catcher and the Ry there is something that is qualitatively different about Kurt vet's book slaughterhouse 5 this book doesn't work like the old books this book is different in how it's assembled different in how um it works in terms of uh narration it wants to invent new forms and new rules for the craft of fiction to hold vet's message the first chapter spends a great deal of time discussing vet's frustration um in being unable ultimately to write a book a traditional book about his experience in dresen during 1945 I'm on page two I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time when I got home from the second world war 23 years ago I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden since all I would have to do would be report on what I had seen and I thought too that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money since the subject was so big but not many words about Dresden came from my mind then not enough of them to make a book anyway and not many words come now either when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Paul muls with his sons full grown I think of how useless The Dresden part of my memory has been and yet how tempting dresen has been to write about and so on if you skip ahead just a few pages he um he illustrates you he illustrates his desire to write a book um when one afternoon he outlines the entire straightforward chronological narrative on a rooll of wallpaper I'm on page five now I used my daughter's crayons a different color for each main character one end of the wallpaper was the the beginning of the story and the other end was the end and then there was all that middle part which was the middle and the blue line met the red line and then the yellow line and then the yellow line stopped because character the character represented by the yellow line was dead and so on the destruction of dresen was represented by a vertical band of orange cross-hatching and all the lines that were still alive passed through it came out the other side the end World line stops was a beatfi on the El so bonut tells us in very very straightforward language that he has written previous novels he's written he's written a whole box of short stories by the time we get to the late 60s and what he says is is that he has trafficked in climaxes and narration and characterization and drama he knows how to write a straightforward chronological novel he's read a great deal he's published books but for some reason the tools that he has that have allowed him to produce these earlier books are inadequate for producing a narrative message about his experience in Dresden and out of this very natural experience out of 23 years of frustration vonet arrives at the point where he decides that he's going to have to invent a new novel form to hold this message this is not experimentation by Design This is experimentation by desperation and so this book by taking 23 years to get to the page does some very interesting things in terms of the formal properties of the novel on the one hand this book is a work of art it's here to explore some very high-minded ideals about war about human nature about the aftermath of traumatic experience but on the other hand this book is also about the construction of art it is the construction of Art seen side by side with the finished product of art this book is a work of fiction Billy pilgrims made up a number of the characters that company Billy Pilgrim to the to the um prisoner of war camps are made up but at the same time this is also a work of meta fiction that is this is a book that's very interested in the investigation of what makes fiction or how fiction comes into being or what fiction is ultimately intended to accomplish both for the audience and for the author himself this is a book that's interested in developing a protagonist a main character Billy Pilgrim but this is also a book that's interested in charting the author's relationship to the character that he creates and so we have we have a number of things moving in and out from each other and this is going to be a book that in one hand works like books we've previously seen such as catch when the Ry or The Great Gatsby or the adventures of uh huckle very fth in that we do have a story about a specific period of American involvement but on the other hand this is going to be a book about the making of a book and what the making of the book does for its author in addition to that this book is going to dispense with a number of other common fiction tropes um in favor of low art science fiction I'm much later in the book I'm up on page 87 well before I get to page 8 7 vonet tells us right at the beginning what we're in for I'm on the title page before we jump up to 87 slaughter house 5 or the Children's Crusade a duty dance with death by Kurt bonette a fourth generation German American now living in Easy circumstances on Cape Cod and smoking too much who as an American infantry Scout or is the combat as a prisoner of war witnessed the firebombing of Dresden Germany the Florence of the elves a long time ago and survived to tell the tale this is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tri famador where the flying saucers come from peace now hold that in your mind um for a second that here on the title page before we even get the first line of narration Kurt vonet is telling us that this book has been consciously assembled after the manner of those books books that one would find on the planet tral famador and to explain that Kurt vonet has thoughtfully included a description of a book from trell famador in his own book now I'm on page 87 Billy has just been picked up by the TR fodorian and here we go Billy asked for something to read on the trip to tr famador his captors had five million Earthling books on microfilm but no way to project them in Billy's cabinet he had only one actual book in English which would be placed in a trough borian Museum it was Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Suzanne let me just stop there for a second this is a joke that back in 1969 would have been immediately apparent and funny to all of vet's original readers um Valley of the Dolls is uh trashy soap opera this would be like Advanced aliens coming to Earth right now and deciding to take off with the first five seasons of Beverly Hills 90210 as a representative work of Earthling art and Earthling culture Billy read it thought it was pretty good in spots the people in it certainly had their ups and downs ups and downs but Billy didn't want to read about the same ups and downs over and over again he asked if there wasn't please some other reading material matter around only TR fodorian novels which I'm afraid you couldn't begin to understand said the speaker on the wall let me look at one anyway so they sent him in several they were little things a dozen of them might have had the bulk of a Valley of the Dolls with all of its ups and downs ups and downs Billy couldn't read tral fodorian of course but he could at least see how the books were laid out in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars Billy commented that the clumps might be Telegram exactly said the voice they are telegrams there are no telegrams on trador but you're right each clump of symbols is a brief Urgent Message describing a situation a scene we Tri theodorians read them all at once not one after the other there isn't any particular relationship between the messages except that the author has chosen them carefully so that when seeing all it once they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep there is no beginning no middle no end no suspense no moral no causes No Effects what we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time and so here VOD get tips his hat momentarily to tell us how we should view this book in terms of its formal structure well this is a TR fodorian novel or it's written in the style of the tralfamadorian novels and so this book is meant to be short it's only a couple hundred pages and if you look at individual Pages there's a lot of padding and well the space between the letters is called leting and there's a lot of uh White space there and so this is a very short book it's maybe 200 pages in your in your uh printed bound book where this would have been 130 or 140 manuscript pages when vonet turned it in um Von's telling us that this is how we should approach this book one of the things that has been dispensed with is chronology supposedly the events don't happen one after the other and here he tells us well that's the point what you're supposed to do is see all of these images next to each other just theost purposely so that you can get a pleasing deep and complex image of Billy Pilgrim and the problems that he struggles with after he returns home from World War II so this book not only wants to deliver some new ideas about the war this book also wants to create a new form to hold those ideas having said that it would probably also be useful to point out that this book has technically two parts to it it has a very short first part which is embodied mostly in the first chapter and then a very long second part which is Chapters two through the end of the book the first chapter well it is mostly an essay or A Memoir of Von's experience attempting to write this book slaughterhouse 5 and chapters 2 through the end or well then the novel with some commentary of um that vate actually produces but by including that first chapter in there vonet well he places himself in the novel as though he is a character in his own work and so I'd like to begin with a discussion of the author's life in previous books we've looked at we didn't look that closely at the author's life and in part the reason for that is is that the author did not include himself in his own work or did not include herself in her own work but here the book has taken into its materials that this is a book about Kurt vonet trying to produce a book this book though it works with time travel and other science fiction elements though it has space aliens that look like uh plungers with little eyes um in the palm of their hands though it has many Fantastical elements in it beneath that this is a book about Kurt Bonet trying to expel the demons that he carried with him after World War II and to place them in something tangible into a book as u means of him finally moving on U beyond the horrors of what he saw in World War II and since this is a firstperson memoir SL Noel since this book is clearly inviting us to make comparisons between vut's life and the work that he produces I want to pull in some things about vut's life and talk about how they've influenced the development of this book Kurt vonette was born on November 11th 1922 the youngest of three children his father uh Kurt senior is an architect and his mother is from a socially prominent family in Indianapolis where they had lived for three generations vate would have grown up well for his early years in a in a very expensive house in an upscale neighborhood he went to private school for a while he would have had a library stocked with Classics he would have had some servants at his house but he also would have grown up in the moral religious center of the United States and you can see that element in conflict in this book this is very much a book written by a person who has grown up from uh a traditional belief system that after witnessing World War II the mechanized Warfare the extermination of tens of thousands of people in an organized Massacre is asking himself how can we as people do this how can we as a group of people allow these types of Wars to go on to have one war after another what is wrong with ourselves that seems to be one of the underlying questions of this book who are we and why do we let Wars um continue in the way that they have for the past hundreds of years growing up vaget would have had a religious understanding of mankind he would have seen people as basically good he would have seen the United States as a nation that um protected weak people that protected refugees that protected um that protected non-mil non non-combatants non-military combatants and so he is deeply troubled by what he's seen over in World War II and you can see those two large those two large philos philosophical viewpoints in in conflict with each other on the one hand Voda grow grew up believing in the essential goodness of individuals in groups of people and on the other hand in World War II he saw well what happens when groups of people get together they Tred to exert their will on other people they kill them they hurt them they damage them in the name of a good cause he wants to know which one is the more authoritative view to have are we really basically good as our core nature or do we really really strive to um exert our will over other groups of people this is one of the questions that's beneath the book and you can see this thread um going way back into bonet's childhood the stock market crash of 1929 breaks bonet's family they lose their house they have to move into a middle class uh neighborhood though vag get's older siblings all went to private schools there isn't money for for Kurt to continue at a private school and so he has to go to a public school this library that they had in their house that's gone and so well the high-minded high art young childhood that vonet experienced goes away um in his early youth Bonet would have gone to operas and plays he would have been introduced to Dickens and uh Huck Fen and Edgar Alan Poe he would have uh visited um museums that were explain works of high art well then after a certain point in his Boyhood he goes off into these middle class neighborhoods and his friends would have taken him down to the movie theater where they' watch Cals such as Buck Rogers or they would have seen cowboy western Cals they would have saw seen a number of U popular entertainments there he would have listened to radio detective dramas and you see these two influences these two very different influences in his early childhood you see the higher art of his uh young childhood and then you see the low art or the popular art of his later childhood you see well High art would be um interests such as well who are we as people how should we act during war and low art would be things such as uh space aliens from Buck Rogers and in this book he's he's conflating he's taking High art and low art and trying to push them together to create one continuous narrative in this book the author is interested in trying to come to an understanding of what was American's moral responsibility for their actions in Dresden in this book W wants to take a look at how people deal with trauma how do they get over trauma what happens when you've been through a war and survived it that's one of the things this novel wants to take a look at but then on the other hand this novel wants to have fart jokes this novel has lapstick humor um this novel has uh space aliens this novel has time travel it's taking all of those things High art and low art and push them together to create a very unique book while at home oh we've done that one um in college he goes to Carell University he studies uh biology and chemistry he wants to be a chemical engineer originally uh he had wanted to study Arts the English and writing in particular but his father told him that he should study something quote more practical and so in his own time he continues to write in college he also edits the school newspaper after college he studies mechanical engineering as part of his training for the military um and then prepares the ship out to England after the war is already going shortly before he leaves he returns home to Indianapolis where in May of 1944 his mother commits suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills and you can see this too vonet has this impersonal experience with death he's witnessed the aftermath of the dress and fire bombings where tens of thousands of people lost their lives people that vate for the most part did not know but also at the same time in his life there's the death of his mother by her own hands suicide and so there is this question you how do we deal with death what does death mean how do we account for it how do we absorb it um if we as people are designed or if we're made to believe in the value of life if we think that life is good and should continue what do we do about death and there's this double there's this uh double lens apparatus that this book looks at bonan has this personal experience the death of his mother and he also has this wartime experience the impersonal death of tens of thousands of people and this is also animating some of the material in this book How do we deal with in death is Billy Pilgrim's assertion that well so it goes that people are just alive in different points of of temporal history is that good enough for us to account for death in England vaget receives further training as an infantrymen then joins the 106 infantry man division within months uh within months of active duty while participating at the Battle of the Bulge baget is captured just like Billy Pilgrim on December 19th 1944 and just like Billy Pilgrim becomes a prisoner of war in Germany he sent by rail to Dresden which was considered an open city a city that because of its architectural Beauty cultural treasures and lack of military targets was considered off limits for air strikes just like Billy pilgram by the time we get to early 1945 bonut feels that he's safe he's in Dresden um this is a city that has a number of architectural Treasures very old buildings has a number of works of art housed there Bonet is under the impression that there's no military training areas in Dresden that there's no uh manufacturing companies that are contributing significantly to the German war effort and therefore well there's no reason for the Allied Forces to bomb it bodet also has a job making this vitamin enriched malt syum which is the exact same job that Billy Pilgrim has in the book um and so he's able to sneak spoonfuls of this uh this Rich syrupy sugary vitamine substance so he has a pretty good source of food he's heard from other people that the Germans are running out of material that they're in trouble and so he knows or he believes that if he can just hang on for another 6 months or maybe a year year and a half at most he's going to be just fine the war will be over and he will be repatriated back to American forces if he can just hold on he should be good he's got food he's got shelter he's in a city that doesn't have a great deal of military involvement and so he's in a pretty good spot for being a prisoner of war but then on the evening of February 13th and 14th dresen is destroyed in a controversial Firestorm raid by bombers of the royal Air Force force and the US Army Air Force in an attempt to speedily end the war by a show of overwhelming Force at this point in dresden's history it is uh swelling with refugees the population of Germany is in flux people are leaving towns that have been attacked people are leaving homes because uh they are close to where the fighting is going on and um refugees are moving from town to town which is why we will never know how many people die The Dresden firestorms the let me see the mayor's count officially is 135,000 but there are other accounts that other not accounts other estimates that place the number closer to a quarter million and that's a pretty big gap that's a gap of 115,000 people um that may have lost their lives there in addition to the the base amount we're never going to know but even if we take the lower number 135,000 well vonet believes that this is the largest organized massacre in the history of mankind never before has one group incinerated wiped out 135,000 people and planned Massacre ever this number is larger um than the deaths that that that come from Hiroshima from the druman of the atomic bomb in Japan Bonet feels that he's witnessed the largest Massac her and therefore he feels a responsibility to write about it only he's unable to do so Bonet and his platoon of workers survive because they are quartered in a meat locker far enough underground to escape aixi and incineration press into Service as a corpse Miner Bonet participates in the cleanup of the city and the city after the bombings would have been horrific um skeletal buildings piles of corpses there would have been the smell of decay flesh there would have been this um Bubble of burnt residue covering everything by late April the advaning Russian army scares away vut's guards and on May 22nd vaget is returned to American forces following his return home he marries his childhood sweetheart Jane Marie Cox um and on September 1st of that year he begins graduate work in anthropology at the University of Chicago paid for by by the GI bill it is his training as an anthropologist that gives rise to a number of characters in this book The tralfamadorians are probably the most obvious example of the anthropologists in this book and they're a joke Anthropologist they're they say funny ironic sardonic things anthropology has as its aim the to chart the movements of civilization from a great distance and this is what the Triad orians do for example they understand Wars in this way Wars are when one group of people heat up or change the environment to make it uninhabitable for another group of people well this is true bombs do uh create a great deal of heat and fire and um make the area uninhabitable but um this understanding of of of a firestorm of bombings really misses any human impact that it might have and so these are one of the one one joke Anthropologist is in the book The other one is Howard W Campbell Howard W Campbell is the American who's defected to become a Nazi and he's written a monograph to explain to the Nazis how Americans are um why they think the way they do and I'll just read you a short passage from that from that um monograph and it too is an example of this kind of joke anthropology that's peppered throughout the book this is from Campbell's Campbell's writing America is the wealthiest Nation on Earth but its people are mainly poor and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves to quote the American humorist Ken hubard it ain't no disgrace to be poor but it might as well be it is in fact a crime for an American to be poor even though America is a nation of poor every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold no such Tales are told by American poor they mock them M themselves and glorify their betters the meanest eating or drinking establishment owned by a man who is himself poor is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question if you're so smart why ain't you rich there will also be an American flag no larger than a child's hand glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register okay so bonette throws these anthropologists into his book and this is something that vaget has studied and I believe the larger point that Von's trying to make um is this this type of study is not useful in understanding what wars really do you can't look at things from this distance and come to reasonable conclusions nor can you guide anyone through the experience of coming out of a war if all you do is look at people in groups from such distance and so he throws some of his academic training in the book as though to say hey all your book learning ink going to get you that far in life while at College while in graduate school vonet finds that very few people are willing to critically examine the bombing of Dresden it's overshadowed by the atrocities committed by the Germans the killing of six million Jews but vaget is neither able to explain nor justify America and Britain's involvement in the fiery extermination of tens of thousands of German citizens most without any military connection Through official channels he learns that the dresen fire bombing has been classified as top secret and vaget has been it believes it has been classified so that its memory will die from history additionally he finds his professors unwilling to examine American motives or strategies inside the war and we have a we have a an example of that in the book itself I'm on page 10 I happen to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it about the book would write he was a member of a thing called the committee on social thought and he told me about the concentration camps and about how Germans have made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on all I could say was I know I know I know um and so when vaget returns from the war he's seen something that he feels the American government doesn't want spread around he's survived Dresden he knows what Americans and the British did there and he tries to tell other people about it and he finds it their uninterested he also finds that the American government is unwilling to let him have any documents about the fire bombing of Dresden to satisfy his interest in knowing more about why this happened um who called for it what was our underlying National motivation to call for the death of tens of thousands of civilians Bonet drops out of graduate school he completes all of his coursework but he doesn't complete his master's thesis this would be somewhat like finishing college but not completing your senior project um and instead he moves to scantic D New York and takes a job as a publicist for GE it is during this period that he begins writing short stories um they started to appear in magazines in the early 50s and in 1952 his first novel player of piano is published by scribers throughout the 1950s he publishes short stories and novel works on jobs he sells cars he teaches the emotionally disturbed he works in public relations um though slowly his reputation as a fiction writer grows particularly with a younger audience in 1965 the University of Iowa invites him to come to Iowa City to teach for two years in the nation's best known creative writing program it's the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop and while there from 1965 to 1967 vonette again returns to his Dres the novel well over 20 years have passed from the time that vaget was inded into the time that he writes the first successful draft of his Dre in novel well during this time the ideas have you know moved around in his head he's been able to pull them apart and put them back together he's also reached the point where he understands that a traditional straightforward narrative is not going to be an effective novel to hold the type of philosophical idea is that he would like to put into this novel he wants to talk about why we are the way we are when we're in groups when we're when we are in nation states why are we always so protective why are we warlike why do we want to um exert our will over the will of other groups he sees this as a fundamental uh problem of human nature he also wants to write about uh the meion of death he also wants to write about how we overcome trauma and he says that he's unable to do that in a straightforward like the great gadsby or catcher in the Ry these types of straightforward chronological narrative books can't hold the ideas that he wants to put into fiction and by now after struggling with this after being frustrated with this writing project for 20 years he's able to put together this experimental novel this trial borian novel that holds some of these ideas the year after he finishes his uh his stint at the unity of Iowa's writer's Workshop he goes back to Dresden in 1968 where he has a Guggenheim Fellowship um to observe the the progress of Dresden I'm on page one this is the part that's referred to right as we open the novel I really did go back to Dresden with the gugenheim money God love it in 1967 it looked a lot like Dayton Ohio more Open Spaces that Dayton has there must have been tons of human bone meal on the ground I went back there with an old War buddy Bernard B O'Hare and we made friends with a cab driver who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of War his name was gearhard Mueller he told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while we asked him how it was to live under communism and he said that it was terrible at first because everybody had to work so hard and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing but things were much better now he had a pleasant little apartment and his daughter was getting an excellent education his mother was incinerated in The dresen Firestorm so it goes he sent ohare a postcard at Christmas time and here's what it said I wish you and your family also as to your friend merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of Peace and Freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will I like that very much if the accident will in one interview Bonet told the reporter quote it seemed a categorical imperative that I write about Dresden the firebombing of Dresden since it was the largest massacre in the history of Europe and I'm a person of European extraction and I a writer had been present I had to say something about it but as he remarks in the novel his fear is quote there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre in another interview vonet says quote when we went to war we felt our government was a respector of Life careful about not injuring civilians and that sort of thing well Dresden had no tactical value it was a city of civilians yet the Allies bombed it until it burned and melted and then they lied about it and that was startling to us in 1969 vonet publishes slaughterhouse 5 with the delor Press which becomes an immediate bestseller and establishes vonet as an antiwar spokesman for the Vietnam generation as well as one of the early spokesmen for a new breed of experimental novels and here's his new book recently published and as we launch into it what we see in that first chapter is vonet not only talking about how he's created this work not only talking about his personal process and transforming Memoir into fiction in that first chapter vonet goes around and asks a lot of people in different ways how did you get over World War II he asked Gearhart Mueller that in the canab how did you get over World War II well Mueller says though not quite in these words that he's trying to move on his daughter's getting a good education he wants to live in a world where there's Peace and Freedom he's asking the professor at the University of Chicago how did you move on and the professor is telling him well I moved on by thinking about what the Germans did to the Jews I ignore or I diminish the consequences of the American war atrocities by focusing on the German war atrocities in other words America's not as bad as the Germans in World War II well he's asking his friend um Bernard O'Hare how did how did you get on after World War II well Bernard O'Hare he can't remember anything he's either choosing not to remember it because it is too painful or he's unable to access those memories these things are Beyond him he's getting Beyond it by putting it out of his mind either through will or through some other stronger Force the nicest veterans those that saw Frontline Duty they're getting Beyond it by seeking true deep caring relationships with other people Mary O'Hare well she's getting beyond the war by asking bonut not to write about it to write about the war is only going to perpetuate the cycle of War if you make your book look like a fantastic movie that would Star John Wayne She tells wanan that's only going to create more Wars that's going to send more babies off to war and well vodan himself is wondering how or if he's going to be able to get Beyond World War II he has this disease where late at night after drinking a little bit and starting to smoke he starts to call his friends his old war buddies because though 23 years have passed since he's been in the war he still thinks about it all the time give him a little drink and he's back there he wants to find people who can talk about it with him as though well the art of talk might somehow take him beyond the experience of what it is that he's seen he's aware that America is not really able to get Beyond World War II in the logic of this book this book tells us that World War II is undigested experience America as a nation has blocked it it doesn't want to look at what it did in Germany in Dresden in particular and because it's undigested experience well America is going to have a propensity to get in more Wars and vaget is saying here in the late 60s that because America hasn't looked at how it truly acted in World War II that it is now involved in another War another war that has some unjust elements in it such as Vietnam and he says as long as America doesn't look at its underlying motivation it is likely that the cycle of warfare is going to continue and so as vat launches into his book proper with chapter 2 in Chapter 2 we first meet Billy Pilgrim listen Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time but before we even get to that sentence vaget has already brought forward a really rich table of intellectual materials um lenses through which we're going to see this book vaget is telling us that this book is not just a story about Billy Pilgrim it's also a story about himself this is how I bonaga I'm trying to get the experience of War out of my system I'm writing a book about it um that's part of what this book's about it's about the novel The Billy Pilgrim story but it's also about how vaget produces it and the struggle he goes with to produce it and what the production of this book might ultimately mean for V himself it's also well about Billy Pilgrim Billy Pilgrim is a character that's suffering traumatic effects from the war he has come unstuck in time he's returning to that war over and over in this book he can't seem to get away from it and this book wants to talk about how well how soldiers how civilians how nations are supposed to move Beyond graphic violent Warfare It's interested in that this book is interested in why we as people get in Wars over and over again what is it about our nature that is pugnacious that draws us to Wars and what can we do about this this book wants to examine how is it that we as as uh individuals as lovers of life people who value being alive how is it that we're supposed to accommodate death um what is the philosophical means by which we're supposed to approach that experience by the time we get to chapter 2 this book has brought in a lot of strong themes and asks us to consider them as we work our way through the Billy Pilgrim story The Billy Pilgrim story I'll say this before I let you go the Billy Pilgrim story is is meant to be seen as uh a book that has no chronology vonet tells us this in a number of places Billy pilgrims come unstuck in time well this novels come unstuck in time as well we have no true chronology but I will tell you this it's only an illusion that the novel's unstuck in time the novel does have a chronology in it and so as you work your way through this book um if you're finding that it's a little bit difficult to keep track of where you are the main story is told in a straightforward chronological way that is Billy Pilgrim goes to Germany Billy Pilgrim is captured Billy Pilgrim gets on the train in Germany to take him to the prisoner of war camps Billy Pilgrim arrives in the prisoner of war camps Billy Pilgrim goes to dresen most all of those long scenes are told in a straightforward chronological fashion and all it is only the peripheral scenes the scenes of with his daughter the scenes of his wedding anniversary and so on um that are told outside of that um outside of that chronology so there truly is a backbone in this book that does have a chronological formation if that helps you proceed with a little more ease through the rest of the book um hope you found this helpful see you soon