The tittle for this entry says it all. I have finished Slaughterhouse-Five and have many questions. Getting into Vonnegut’s intellect, his personal life, and the characters he created show the genius he is and the masterpiece he accomplished to write. After finishing the book I was left with more and more questions than before, but that doesn’t take anything from the book: that’s part of the experience Slaughterhouse-Five is. I expected the last chapter to explain many things from the previous ones, but it didn’t. Vonnegut wrote simple descriptions and explanations like “He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot”. That quote actually explained who was the man who was shot and killed for grabbing someone’s teapot. I had high or different expectations of the last chapter, but instead of doing the expected, it did the unexpected. Kurt Vonnegut ended his book as he had written most of it: concise. Maybe I was left with questions because the book itself finished with one. “Poo-tee-weet?” That’s for Vonnegut to know and me to find out. Probably I will never know more about living and reliving everything at the same time, the way Billy did, but that doesn’t concern me because the novel was great.
In the beginning (first chapter) I was told this book was written on a pillar of salt. Maybe the ruins of war and it could be, that all “Poo-tee-weet” means, is nothing. Nothing, emptiness, vacancy, a void left in the void. I’m sure many people didn’t want that ending and probably disliked it and Vonnegut for doing it. But that’s what he decided to do and he warned us about his book. He doesn’t want to look back at war and promised not to do so in chapter one. “People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore”, is what I see as one of Vonnegut’s explanations of how he wrote his book.
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