I am making decent progress on this book. To me, it seems like a change of pace that is an easy read. That is probably because I am missing all of the significance enjoying this story.

Kurt Vonnegut was an author of the ‘Greatest Generation’. He served in the heart of the World War II years and was part of some of the infamous battles is Europe like D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. It is no wonder that war has a strong pull to his work. This is my first exposure to Vonnegut and the way things are going I will be back for more.

The story’s main character is a man named Billy Pilgrim. He seems to be an enigma of a person surrounded by luck. So, for instance he marries into money and becomes a highly successful business owner with investments in the medical field as well as franchises such as hotels. Meanwhile, it seems like he can barely function in a day to day capacity.

I don’t know this for a fact, but the story seems to be written as a PTSD description or possibly mental illness. I haven’t read this book of the same genre but Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolf and trying to describe what taking LSD feels like seems like how this book is structured. There are many horrific events that are described as time flashes forward and backward each event triggering a new anecdote of the story.

I can see why Vonnegut is labeled a humorist of satirist. So far, there is a lot of death in the book. Each time a death is written about, he uses the phrase ‘so it goes’. But, to make it more comical, he even uses the phrase out of context. As an example, when he is describing dead (flat) water, so it goes. A lot of serious and absurd situations are delivered deadpan and matter of fact.

As of yet, I haven’t determined anything in line with my typical concepts in these three chapters. I was reading a quote by Vonnegut and he said about this book the book is nonsensical because there is nothing valuable to learn about mass extermination. This is why people have labelled Vonnegut as a strong antiwar voice.

I could add one more thing this week. The supposed subject of this book is the firebombing of Dresden Germany. As of yet, Vonnegut has not really written about it. Billy is trying to write a book about the event but has a hard time getting his war buddy’s to talk about it. So let’s focus on that.

The firebombing of Dresden has two opinions. The first is that this was a campaign to eliminate resources the Nazis were using to continue fighting the war. The other side contends that this was a punitive attack. It is true that these were valuable, soft targets but it is also true that most of the damage was not military but civilian. I know that it is a very thin line between military and civilian when they are building war material. The opposition side contends that it was unnecessary because it was only a matter of time before Germany gave up.

I suspect that this anti-bombing opinion has gotten ahold of Vonnegut. Later in the book he starts to reveal more, including his own opinions as a result of the observation of the campaign. You will have to wait until next week for more of that stuff. Just like I talked about Wednesday, it just isn’t fair and when something unfair happens, you want vengeance.

End Your Programming Routine: Don’t think for a minute that you cannot substitute Japan for Germany. We were going to do whatever we had to to ensure that we were going to make them pay as well. The difference between our story and theirs is that it is very rarely brought up that a neutral country (USA) had cut off Japan from raw materials and built weapons and munitions for the Allies. There is no way I can condone the actions of our opponents but don’t think they didn’t have some shoving to get there.