“Billy's outward listlessness was a screen. The listlessness concealed a mind which was fizzing and flashing thrillingly... 'Why don’t they let him die?' he asked Lily.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘That’s not a human being anymore. Doctors are for human beings. They should turn him over to a veterinarian or a tree surgeon. They’d know what to do. Look at him! That’s life, according to the medical profession. Isn’t life wonderful?’” (243-244)
This comes from the section where Billy is in the hospital after his plane crash. Professor Rumfoord says that he is no longer a human since he is just like a vegetable laying there. I think that in this section, Vonnegut is showing the things war can cause, things like PTSD. Billy's condition could be from the plane crash, but it seems as though it is mostly from what he saw in the war. Rumfoord's inability to write about the Dresden bombing in his history book seems to parallel Vonnegut's inability to write about Dresden, as he describes to us in the first chapter. Even though they can't write about it for different reasons, it seems very similar. Rumfoord also seems to have a different take on life than in the rest of the book, with its "so it goes" attitude. He wants Billy to be gone, just because he doesn't talk to anyone, it isn't as simple as it seems from the outside, to Billy he is traveling all over the place, very much alive, and his life is wonderful, as Rumfoord sarcastically states.
Q: Why did Billy wait until now to think up his plans for telling everyone "about the flying saucers, the negligibility of death, and the true nature of time"? Why did he feel the need to wait, and why did he decide that after his plane crash and hospital stay that that was the right time?
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