you wake up in the middle of the night. the floorboards are as cold as the metal floor of the boxcar transporting prisoners of war through the cold german winter, assuring a swift transition of the mind between the two locations. that is, of course, an unnecessary crutch for the likes of billy, who can flow through time as easily as he breathes; the cold floor of the boxcar is always felt, no matter where he is. so it goes

i do have to mention though, that while the book is brilliant, one of the most fascinating things about it was the treatment of women in it, and the way they are never people and barely even characters at all. the way every character's body is described is very utilitarian - what the body looks like it was made for, what was/is its function as a tool, which makes sense as most of these descriptions are of soldiers and from a soldier's perspective. and since the woman (all women, any woman)'s purpose is sex, all of them are described in terms of their fuckability and whether or not the narrator and billie would. it's interesting to me because neither the narrator nor billie are presented as otherwise actively sexist or womanizing in any way, and yet all women (of which there are a total of four) are "silly wamen" non-characters with a sex appeal rating out of ten.

the first chapter, the only one outwardly about Vonnegut and his real life, features the fifth woman (the first one if going by the order of appearance) about whom Vonnegut is entirely normal about. the believer in Vonnegut's creative genius in me wants to believe that it's because Billy's view of women is purposeful somehow and is not reflective of Vonnegut's views (in spite of the fact that the narration is clearly in his voice, not Billie's); the cynic in me thinks that it's just because Vonnegut's friends with Mary and her husband that he's not weird about her, and being weird about fictional women he made up is fair game lol