It is amazing how people can live through these awful times, and how so many people are killed, and yet the survivors are expected to continue on through life as if they had not been to war,but had instead lived peacefully at home all their life. Vonnegut tells of the awful things Billy has seen and experienced and how he has suffered so, but he still comes back to the line saying, 'life goes on'. However, even the birds only say, "Poo-tee-weet." What Vonnegut is trying to show that awful things happen in the world that make an impact on thousands of people, and yet life continues on. Bringing it back to the first chapter, Vonnegut writes how after a massacre everyone is supposed to be dead, never to say another word, except for the birds. The final line in the novel reads, "One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, "Poo-tee-weet?" (Vonnegut 215). The memories a person contains are where they will forever remain even after they die, so they better make them good and happy ones. Therefore Vonnegut is telling the readers in his final statement, to not live a life full of bad memories of war, for if people will end up like Billy Pilgrim: anxious and discouraged, if they have these memories. The war completely discouraged Billy and made him give up and stop fighting for his life during the war. His doctor even advised him to take a nap everyday when he tells him about his weeping. The man cried every day, although no one knew it. Additionally, Vonnegut explains the effects the war had on Billy Pilgrim. ![]() Throughout the entirety of the novel, Vonnegut discusses all of the awful sights Billy Pilgrim experiences in the war: prisoners marching in awful conditions, prisoners dying on trains, the firebombing of Dresden, removing corpses from the rubble, and a man being shot for stealing a teapot. Vonnegut is not overjoyed, for many of his memories are filled with war and destruction because of his memories from the Second World War and the effects those experiences had on him. In this statement, Vonnegut implies that people forever exist in their memories, so they should make them happy memories without war and destruction. Although this is the last line of the novel, Vonnegut's true last statement is at the beginning of the last chapter and it goes like this: "If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed" (Vonnegut 211). This line expresses the meaning that there are a lot of aspects of life that humans cannot even simply begin to understand, like what the bird meant when he said to Billy "Poo-tee-weet". In the first chapter of the novel, Vonnegut tells us that "Poo-tee-weet" is how his novel ends and that this novel was a failure. ![]() The last line of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, says, "One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, "Poo-tee-weet?"(Vonnegut 215).
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