"I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby. The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad" (4).
"Derby's son would survive the war. Derby wouldn't. That good body of his would be
filled with holes by a firing squad in Dresden in sixty-eight days. So it goes." (83).
You know what I'm getting at.
All throughout the novel, the only suspense that Vonnegut left the reader was regarding the death of "Poor old Edgar Derby," who was to be shot by a firing squad for stealing a teapot. As a reader, I was lookin forward to reading about his trial and hearing the reactions of his fellow Americans. In my mind, I had pictured an ending similar to that of the movie 'Hart's War', where the American leader goes out with a bang. Elected as the American leader, I assumed that Derby would follow a similar path, one that would have an everlasting impact on me, as the reader.
"Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot. So it goes" (214).
After building up 213 pages of suspense (from the third sentence onward), I feel as though I've been slapped in the face by Vonnegut's cruel reality. There are no heroes in war. No matter how reputable an individual may be, what he/she ends up with is not always what he/she deserves. Edgar Derby didn't "go out with a bang."
No one ever does.
-Arshdeep
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