“Poo-tee-weet”

I was left somehow with an empty feeling with the ending of the book. As if it hadn’t concluded anything we didn’t already know, or maybe saying that all his book was a stupidity with the last sentence “Poo-tee-weet”.

There is not much to say that hasn’t been said before about the book. The last three chapters didn’t hold any new revelations, any new insight on the book. But if I had to make conclusions about this book, and stick to them, I’d say that Billy’s insanity becomes clearer in the end. It’s not confirmed, it’s not a final conclusion, it’s simply an implication we can make based on the facts. I had mentioned in previous blogs that probably the idea of the Tralfamadorians came from the novels of Kilgore Trout, because he had read them during a time in his life where he had to rebuild his beliefs. In the last chapters, an extra novel is mentioned, The Big Board, and it’s this novel that for me could confirm Billy’s insanity. It talks about two humans (man and woman) who are taken by extraterrestrials to a distant planet, and are displayed in a zoo there. For me, that IS Billy’s story, just as a Tralfamadorian would say, it has been there all along, and always will be.

Another thing that could be said is about Vonnegut’s appearances in the story, which was the most changing factor in the book. We thought he was an invisible character; then that he was a real character in Billy’s life, that they had met; then, that he was the only real character in the book, and that all other characters represented something related to war. That is a dilemma I will never have answered, but as far as I know, I’m confident to say that Vonnegut made appearances in the book to connect it to the real world. Evidently Billy and Billy’s story is fictional, but it might portray factual things about life, about war, about life after war. So with the purpose of us not getting lost in the imaginary world of Billy, the author connected it to himself, to keep it real.

The appearance of Professor Rumfoord from Harvard gives an interesting opinion. Why? He is seeking to write a book about WWII, and he wants to mention the huge success and necessity that was Dresden’s fire bombing. Billy is his roommate, but Rumfoord doesn’t show the slightest interest for Billy or his story about the Dresden fire bombing. I think this could be seen as Vonnegut’s way of critiquing historians who write about events like that. They never capture the whole truth about the moment, they make it sound heroic and necessary, but it will never be seen that way by people like Billy who actually lived through it. It comes to say: was all that slaughter really necessary? Was it really an act of heroism to kill so many people? It says that no one, as intelligent as they might be, seeks to write the whole truth about an event like that, because like Vonnegut says at the beginning, there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

That brings me to my last point, the “Poo-tee-weet”. Is Vonnegut implying that his entire book isn’t more intelligent than a bird’s sound? Because there is nothing intelligent to be said about a massacre. Could his book be replaced by a simple “Poo-tee-weet” after a massacre?