Kurt Vonnegut uses facets of irony and figurative language to describe the impact that war has made on his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in the novel Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut displays the absurdity that Billy has experienced in the war by using nonsense words to describe the aftermath of a massacre and by using images such as birds and broken kites to show the way that Pilgrim’s sense of time has been altered due to his experiences.
“The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes. But the little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes.” This epigraph from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five is from a popular Christmas carol that describes Christ as a baby, refraining from crying even though He “saw things worth crying about.” (331) The narrator likens Billy Pilgrim to Baby Jesus, saying that “Billy cried very little…and in that respect, at least, he resembled the Christ of the carol.” (331) The only time that Billy cries openly is when he sees the condition that his horses are in after some “horse pitiers” reproach him for letting the horses suffer. Throughout the novel, Billy is a prisoner of war, trapped on a foreign planet, without proper clothing and watching those around him die horrid deaths, but he only cries when he sees his wounded horses. Jesus cried when Lazarus died and He saw Lazarus’s sisters weeping for their brother, but Billy doesn’t cry because the sight of death and human suffering moves him, he cries because he is upset at the way the horses have been treated. He doesn’t cry for himself or other people, he cries for animals, and this is not expected or logical, it is an absurdity. Throughout the novel, an important concept is that massacres are events that leave the people speechless, because there’s “nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” (211) Billy soundlessly reprimands his wife, claiming that Valencia was “simple-minded…to associate sex and glamour with the war.” (279) The narrator uses the indecipherable and nonsensical phrase “poo-tee-weet” to describe the only sound made after a massacre, and that is the chirping of birds. Birds are often representative of concepts such as freedom and life, the ability to spread one’s wings and conquer gravity. Birds are a symbol in this novel of how life goes on after great tragedies such as massacres, and that life is still possible after such an event, although there is really no sense to make of why something so terrible ever had to occur. That is why they say such absurd things such as “poo-tee-weet.” Birds, freedom and flight however, take on a different light in this novel when Billy is described as another flying object, a kite.
An Englishman equates Billy to a “broken kite” during the war after the Englishman notices his dismal state and the way that his captors have taken him advantage of him. The symbols of the kite and the bird have a few similarities and a few differences among them that are interesting comparisons between Billy and birds. Kites have strings that anchor them to something or someone and although they do have the capacity to leave the ground and fly, it is a controlled flight unlike a free bird. The kite string in Billy’s case may be his fate, the inescapable destiny the he is bound for, to die. However, Billy is aware of his fate and he knows how and when he is going to die. I think that being called a “broken kite” has two different meanings, one being the face-value fact that he is trapped as a prisoner of war and has had what little freedom he had, taken from him. However, Billy is also aware of the Tralfamadorian concept of time in which fate is inevitable and free will is not real, so the idea that he cannot escape his fate makes him a broken kite because he has always been a broken kite once he realized that escape wasn’t real. Flight is just an illusion, because free will never really existed to Billy Pilgrim, except when he didn’t know that it didn’t exist. Even then, his free will was never actually there, he just thought it was, until the aliens enlightened him. If a kite’s flight is just an illusion, then maybe the birds’ flight is also an illusion, depicting the concept that freedom from fate isn’t actually possible and that humans just have an absurd idea that it is. We may all be broken kites but just not know it. Vonnegut writes “even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.” (201) The idea that fate is inescapable is key to Vonnegut’s novel and having Billy described as a “broken kite” is one way that this concept is communicated.
The senselessness of massacres and war are underlined by the idea that death is inescapable and inevitable. The concept that birds are the animals that have something to say after a massacre suggests that it is only our illusionary concept of freedom and escape that makes us believe that a meaningful life is still possible after massacres, because birds sing and birds are the symbols of freedom. However, freedom in this novel is not really freedom at all, but a stringing along by fate. Vonnegut reveals this concept of an illusionary free will through the statement that Billy is a “broken kite” and comparing him to Christ’s resistance to crying as a baby, suggesting that massacres are illogical and all reactions to them are illogical, such as crying, death, the birds’ response of “poo-tee-weet” and optimism for the future. Vonnegut shows optimism through a rewinding of one’s life and looking back into happier moments that have already been lived, not in what’s to come. There is no concept of being optimistic for the future once it is revealed that free will is not actually free to Vonnegut and that death and wars will never stop occurring.
Vonnegut’s comparison of Billy to Christ shows the illogicality of Billy’s reaction to war and the idea that war only generates absurdity. He also uses bird and kite symbolism to describe the concept of an illusionary free will and the fact that war and massacres are illogical and nothing that comes from them are rational either. 
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