So it goes. His last words were, `You think this is bad? This ain't bad' -). In the book, Billy Pilgrim's character is symbolized by insanity, absurdity and irrationality. What made the Dresden bombing even more horrible to him was that as a prisoner, he was ironically protected from the bombs and fire. Billy's being always bemused, utterly helpless, even ridiculous, fits him for the role of an innocent man in a cruel world. The innocence of those who fight in wars is depicted in his character. Billy, as his name suggests becomes the innocent pilgrim through a cruel and absurd world. .
The structure of Slaughterhouse Five also expresses Vonnegut's desolation and loneliness regarding the bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut cannot use the traditional form of the novel in presenting life viewed in a linear because the conventional novel conforms to assumptions of cause and effect and rigidities of time and substance that he questions. For him the apparently pointless firebombing of Dresden, with its destruction of beautiful art and architecture and the killing of thousands of innocents, symbolizes the illogical.
Time and memory also express the author's desolation when he witnessed the massacre of Dresden in the second world war. The science fiction elements of the novel include time travel. Billy travels in time(" Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941-), experience his life's events out of order and repeatedly. He learns on the alien world of Trafalmadore that all time happens simultaneously; therefore no one really dies. But this has its dark side: brutal acts also live on forever. Memory is one of the novel's important themes; because of their memories, Vonnegut and Billy cannot move past the Dresden massacre. Billy leaps back in time to Dresden again and again, but at critical points we see Dresden simply because Billy relives it in his memory.
