Slaughterhouse-Five: Personification 1 key example

He shortly thereafter explains that last line of the novel will contain the same birdsong, which it does: Vonnegut ends Slaughterhouse-Five writing, "Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?'" In both instances the birds are personified, referred to as "talking" or having something to "say," as if they are people who could produce intelligible thoughts. Of course, the birds are not saying anything of substance: "poo-tee-weet" is a meaningless stand-in for generic birdsong. The birds are, however, saying "all there is to say about a massacre," in the sense that there is actually nothing of substance to say about a massacre. As Billy Pilgrim says after death of all kinds, "so it goes," which is itself a relatively non-substantive saying dismissing death as a necessary facet of the world. It is almost certainly not a coincidence that the Tralfamadorian saying and the bird's saying are both three syllables long, somewhat equating the two. The personification of the birds thus illustrates how little there is to say about the horrors of war. 

Vonnegut, however, writes Slaughterhouse-Five in order to say something about massacre—namely its meaninglessness. The personification of the birds, and the "poo-tee-weet" more generally, appears to contradict the novel as a commentary on war and massacre. If nothing intelligent can be said about war, what is the project of Slaughterhouse-Five? This tension is present throughout the novel: Vonnegut mocks himself through the narrator and through Kilgore Trout as a character, claiming his own book is "short and jumbled and jangled" because there is "nothing intelligent to say about massacre." The personification of the birds then furthers the text's central argument—that there is nothing intelligent to say about the horrors of war—while undermining that same argument through saying something intelligent about war: how meaningless it is.