A Secret's Past.

When we keep secrets to ourselves, they die. Throughout history many people might have died with a secret they have never revealed. This did not happen to Billy Pilgrim. In chapter 8 he reveals to us what may seem to be the books biggest secret: the bombing of Dresden. Billy is at his anniversary when he hears a song “Really-I’m O.K and he was, too, except that he could find no explanation for why the song had affected him so grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was. ” (Vonnegut 173). Hearing the song made Billy realize that after all his life he was keeping secrets from himself because there were parts of his life he did not like or wanted to remember.

Billy Pilgrim knew perfectly that he had been a war prison in Dresden and that he was there when the city was bombed but he never realized that trauma it had left on him until this chapter. “They looked liked a silent film of a barbershop quartet. ” “So long forever they might have been singing. Old fellows and pals; so long forever, old sweethearts and pals-God bless’em-” (Vonnegut,178). Hearing this song made Billy remember the night Dresden was bombed and how the soldiers that were not killed could have been singing this song in mourning of all of those who had been killed.

All this time Billy had kept this big secret to himself, he could have seen it as escape, a way to avoid the war from hurting him more than it already had. In this case, the song made the secret come out from Billy letting us all know (the reader and the same Billy) that war had affected him more than what we though it had. It had left a trauma on him. “You looked as though you’d seen a ghost” (Vonnegut 173). The ghost of his past, the ghost of Dresden that will always haunt Billy.