Poo-Tee Weet Dream

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The book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut ends with “One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, ‘Poo-tee-weet?’”(Vonnegut 275), this happened as the troops were leaving Dresden after its fire bombing. Poo-tee-weet comes up 3 different times throughout the book, once after a dream and twice in reference to Dresden. It is not a coincidence that the bird comes after a dream, then in Dresden, maybe the bird is just saying “what now?” The dream comes after Billy was put in the hospital in Germany. Billy was watching a play version of Cinderella and laughed so hard at a certain couplet that he was taken to the hospital and filled with morphine where he had a dream that he was a giraffe. “He woke up with his head under a blanket… near Lake Placid, New …show more content…

He says “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’” (Vonnegut 24). As interesting as this quote is it actually gives us our answer to the question what does poo-too-weet mean? Well birds are simple minded creatures so they do not have a lot they really can say about anything. Humans have massacres and both humans and animals have disasters. So birds don’t really know what is happening around them when humans have massacres. Also the behavior of birds is important here because it is a known fact that birds push their young out of the nests when the parent thinks it is time for them to fly. This disconnects them form their own kin too, because sometimes if the young bird cannot fly yet then they will smash into the ground and die. The birds might have also lost their homes in this massacre. They do not have the intelligence to actually know what happened or if there is going to be more of what happened, so they must simply ask what

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