“Peace is a path to happiness and the future. War is a road to destruction and death. - Devalue Mridha. It is well known that conflicts between different nations or states destroy your own nation, affect the development of the economy and take away the lives of innocent people. Billy Pilgrim, as a soldier in World War II, went through the war and experienced similar events that significantly affected his entire life. In this novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy had no answers, he was shaken by this devastating event. Furthermore, the central theme will be the bombing of Dresden and how “war leads to destruction”. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Throughout this book, Billy Pilgrim is shown traveling to the bombing of Dresden, then to his birthplace and to the planet Tradlafamdor in inconsistent order. First, the innocent community and residents of Dresden were injured in the bombing. Billy said Dresden looked like the surface of the moon: “Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everyone in the neighborhood was dead.” This was due to the destruction that the Allied forces had caused by the bomb and which had taken the lives of many unwanted and innocent people who were not supposed to be killed. In addition, prisoners of war from many countries came together to help dig the corpses, as stated "The first corpse mine began in Dresden". Billy and other POWs helped clean up the remains of Dresden and the more than 25,000 people who died there. Billy observes the sadism and cruelty of the world once the city is bombed. To elaborate, it was said in the book that “the bodies were liquefied and the stench was like mustard and pink gas.” This quote really makes me smell the real scene. Furthermore, Billy faces the Dresden bombing with gratitude and discontent instead of aggression and pain. Never in this novel is Billy seen as suffering or aggressive with anything. In addition, “135,000 people died as a result of an air attack with conventional weapons.” If hundreds of thousands of blameless people died, imagine how many people were injured in this horrible event, just like Billy and how important an event it was that impacted his life ever since. However, this ties into the theme of "War leads to destruction" as Dresden was demolished, many blameless individuals lost their lives and the city was unable to recover, which had a profound impact on its economy . One of the most popular phrases in the book is "So it goes", stated whenever a biotic thing dies. This makes him able to forgive anyone, and he never seems to become angry throughout the novel and comes off as accepting and deeply passive. The quote "So it goes" was said by the Tralfamadorians whenever they saw a corpse, they were described as "they were two feet tall, green, and shaped like fellow plumbers." For them, death is simply a nasty condition at a specific moment in life. Billy Pilgrim currently views death the same way, I think it's because Billy learned from them when the aliens took him to Tralfamador to display in a zoo. "I just shrug my shoulders and say what the Tralfamadorians say about the dead, which is, 'That's the way it is.' This quote proves that Billy learned “So it goes” from,”.