![]() ![]() This repetition of description serves to connect the "Billy Pilgrim" portion of the novel with the narrator's own personal memories and experiences. This is also the odor of the corpses at Dresden a couple days after the firebombing, which Billy Pilgrim discovers as he digs through the rubble of the city in Chapter 10. For example, the narrator describes his own breath when he is drunk as "mustard gas and roses" (1.3.2) – which is what his dog, Sandy, specifically does not smell like (1.4.14). Source(s)Ī lot of the imagery in Slaughterhouse-Five repeats across sections and in different contexts. These cold, corpselike hues suggest the fragility of the thin membrane between life and death, between worldly and otherworldly experience. On various occasions in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy’s bare feet are described as being blue and ivory, as when Billy writes a letter in his basement in the cold and when he waits for the flying saucer to kidnap him. The bird sings outside of Billy’s hospital window and again in the last line of the book, asking a question for which we have no answer, just as we have no answer for how such an atrocity as the firebombing could happen. Birdsong rings out alone in the silence after a massacre, and “Poo-tee-weet?” seems about as appropriate a thing to say as any, since no words can really describe the horror of the Dresden firebombing. ![]() ![]() The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say about war. ![]()
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