In Slaughterhouse Five, when Kurt Vonnegut is describing his experience with WWII, he uses humor as a coping method for the real fear and pain he feels inside. We see Vonnegut in the form of Billy Pilgrim, a young boy in the war that he has no idea what he is doing there. Billy gets lost behind enemy lines and get captured by the germans. All through the describing of these scenes, Billy doesn't seem very effected by any of it. It is if he is just going through the motions of a normal day. I think this is how Billy got through it. He dampened his emotions to everything he saw and decided to keep the mindset of the 40-year-old former hobo in the train car with him, "This ain't too bad. This ain't nothing at all." (70) This way of writing about being caught by the germans in WWII is very unlike Night, by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel made an effort to show the horrors of the concentration camps as real as possible to the reader. Vonnegut describes his experience very differently. Of course, Vonnegut and Wiesel were in different situations, but they did still go through some similar experiences. Vonnegut stats his experiences very plainly and lets the reader take the understand from them with their own ability. The hardships are less forced on the reader than they were with night.

While Vonnegut seems to be masking his real pains of the war in the beginning of the book, i wonder if later on he will eventually open up and let us into how it all really felt for him during the bombing of Dresden.