In the book, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Edgar Derby is a slightly older school teacher that is always referred to in the same way - Poor Old Edgar Derby. After reading this description time after time, I eventually started wondering, Why is he always referred as Poor and Old, and why did Vonnegut feel the need to have this seemingly unnecessary repetition?
I came up with some ideas as to why this phenomena was happening. At first I thought that it was just a physical description and that he was literally Poor and Old. This made sense to me because he was older than the rest of the clique and he was a teacher in what I assumed to be in a small town. But the more I thought about this phrase, the more ideas I had as to why this message was really hammered into the reader's mind. After thinking about it in the back of my mind, I thought of another thing. What I came up with was that Billy felt sorry or even responsible for Derby's death. I thought this was a good explanation, thinking that Billy felt remorse for his older war friend. Whether that remorse was because of his drugged execution via firing squad with "A piece of paper," (Pg. 123) acting as a target attached to him, or because he was such a nice guy and didn't deserve to die is up to interpretation.
But I still have questions as to why this was so important to Vonnegut that he habitually wrote it again and again whenever he referred to Derby. Are there any other ideas that you guys have as to why this was so crucial to the character description?
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