Understanding Vonnegut and his feelings on war.

I found yesterday's class' discussion to be really interesting, not only because of the startling inaccuracies (and possible hidden agenda) in the supposed recorded history but also because of how I felt in reaction to learning of Slaughterhouse Five's origins.

I still defend the point that I made in class, that the exact number of victims at the firebombing of Dresden is irrelevant to what Slaughterhouse Five is trying to do. When you get down to the core of what this book is, it's about the horrors of war and the inevitability of terrible acts of hate and murder, not Dresden itself (although the example of Dresden does serve to disillusion naive readers who believed WWII to be a clear cut war of "the good guys" and "the bad guys").

I think in Vonnegut's mind, all death in war is pointless and wasteful, this being based on the author's early narration and insistence on discussing the horrors committed during WWII. Although this is the interpretation I tend to stick with, the inclusion of the tralfamadorians and the passive narration of "so it goes" seems to also give the possibility of a strange apathy from Vonnegut. It sometimes seems that Vonnegut is trying to teach the belief of real world death and war being ultimately meaningless. Both these ideas are thickly embedded in the book, seeming to cancel out one another. In the end, however, I continue to reach the first conclusion about Vonnegut's meaning, as he portrays himself feeling this way, whereas the apathetic mentality is portrayed through the character of Billy Pilgrim and the tralfamadorians, possibly being used as a way to explain the tortured and emotionally detached life of a person who has experienced terrible hardships.