Slaughterhouse Five Passage Analysis

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader realizes just how much significance every passage has and how much it contributes to the rest of the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about World War II experiences and journeys through time of Billy Pilgrim, from his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant, to postwar and early years. During the novel Billy experiences the events of his life in random order, moving from his past as an American prisoner of war in World War II, to his humdrum middle-class life in the present-day, to his future as a zoo curiosity on the planet Tralfamadore. One passage that summarizes one of the main themes in this novel is when Vonnegut says,
“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because 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 after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?(Vonnegut,13).”

He lets the reader know why writing this book was so complicated; why there is so much death in the novel; and why it is so difficult to say anything intelligent about war.
In the passage Vonnegut gives a reason to why it was so difficult to write this novel and why it came out the way it did. As we can infer from the passage this novel talks about both war and death. Different characters experience war and death in different ways throughout the novel. In the passage he says that there's not much to write about a massacre since every body ends up dead. One of the many techniques that Vonnegut uses in this novel to explore the horror of war is inserting himself as a character into the novel. By doing this he is able