No Crying He Makes

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

One of the few times when Billy finally shows raw emotion, is the sudden scene in which the scolding Germans show him the terrible state of the sickly horses. In that scene Billy goes from as happy and content as can be to boo-hooing like a little baby. That the sight of two dying horses, after living through an entire war, the deaths of many of his comrades  and the fire-bombing of Dresden, is the only think that makes him cry is a testament to the human condition. Sometimes the mortality rates and the body counts reach so high, that we do not even fathom what kind of pain and suffering that truly causes. Consider Billy when speaking of the tombs of bodies buried beneath Dresden, he speaks of no sign of despair nor remorse, only practicality. Because there are so many bodies, they now just burn them rather than bury them. Throughout this entire town thousands of real human beings had perished, and what upsets Billy the most is the sight of two ill-treated horses. As Vonnegut says, "Billy cried very little, though he often saw things worth crying about" (Vonnegut 197). It is apparent that through all that Billy had seen from the war, he developed a very unrealistic view of death. This view of death protected him from the true finality of it and sugar-coated death into something that could easily be overcome if one were to just think differently. Thus it all goes back to what Vonnegut had said the entire time. 135,000 people were killed in that fire-bombing of Dresden, and so it goes...