Reading Blog chapter 3

Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughter House-Five
53-72
Chapter 3
I didn’t understand the importance of the description of Princess and from where she came to this part of the novel especially since she wasn’t mentioned again in the whole chapter. The golden boots sounded as if they weren’t part of the war, innocent, valuable, and the boy who helped Billy Pilgrim sounded as if he was an angel. Why would this helpful boy be in war? How could he survive to it and still be innocent?
If Billy traveled from the prison he was in war to his own office long time after, how would he know if the woman he was evaluating was sick or not? Did he just tell her that she wasn’t sick without really knowing? I thought that it was funny that Billy could be at two places at a time; he could escape from war to his future, driving in his Cadillac and yet appear in a picture at war slightly smiling because of a moment that would happen 23 years later.
It’s strange the way the author puts it in page 60 when he says “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.” Why? This chapter handles lots of simultaneous moments in different times and connects them with physical things: the smile on Billy’s face in the picture, the unexplained weeping because of the cold wind in war about 20 years ago. Will this have anything to do with the impotence Billy had for changing the past the present and the future? I mean how do you know which is the present if you are constantly jumping back and forward without staying constantly in one? Maybe in this story there is no present. The classification by ranks of the war prisoners sounded very much like the separation between men and women in the concentration camps. Also the transportation in trains without being allowed to move remembers me to the transportation of Jews showed in the movie Schindler’s list in which they were all stuffed in to the wagons as if they were objects.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed that the author uses so it goes when he has mentioned a dead person. What will happen to the prisoners? How will they come to freedom? Will Bill tell us how he got free?