Matthew Peeler's Blog

As Montana Wildhack asks Billy Pilgrim to tell her a story, Billy immediately begins telling a war story. To me, this is a natural reaction for anyone who has been in the war. Though this book tends to deviate from typical explanations, I feel like this one is almost as typical as it gets. Throughout the book, it appears that Billy suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This disorder is something that many individuals that come back from war have to deal with. The individual tends to have flashbacks about some of the more difficult times they had during war, just as Billy has. Though the flashbacks do not happen constantly, they often keep the individuals mind stuck on war most of the time. I think this is exactly what happened to Billy as he began to tell his story. Though there is really no evidence to support this story is an actual flashback in itself, I do believe that the flashbacks had an influence on Billy telling this particular story. With it being fresh on his mind, it is easy for him to remember and it is one of the first things that come up. He proceeds to tell Montana about Dresden being destroyed. Though the story did not last for a long period of time, the details of what happened were very precise. He told about what people looked like and what all was lost in the destruction. After Billy tells his story, the book goes of onto another course without a reaction from Montana. This is a rather surprising thing to me, as I would think she would have a rather interesting reaction as her and Billy talk several times throughout the book however, you can understand why there wasn’t a reaction in the book. Oftentimes, people don’t have a certain reaction to a story like this, as they know that the individual telling the story is going through a difficult time. In my opinion, Montana was at a sheer loss of words after Billy told the story about the destruction of Dresden.