The Final Doubt (SHV chps 9-10)

This is the ultimate showdown in Billy's personality and charisma. It is again an example of impressions and being alive. When he is in the hospital in Vermont, people think-and say he is dead. But he is far from this, he is actually aranging his tactic to reveal to the world his experience with the aliens. It is strange how like in this and many other situations, you get to see and hear what other people think about you and have the time to appreciate you in the current condition you are. He was dead physically. They saw him as a deaad man, but what always has mattered in Billy Pilgrim is his mind. His fabulous mind. "Actually, Billy's outward listessness was a screen. The listlessness concealed a mind which was fizzing and flashing thrillingly. It was preparing letters and lectures about the flying saucers, the neglibility of death, and the true nature of time... Professor Rumford said frightful things about Billy within Billy's hearing, confident that Billy no longer had any brain at all."(SHV pg 190)

Now this, through me off completely: "The name of the book was The big Board. He got a few paragraphs int it, and then he realized that he had read it before-years ago in the veteran's hospital. It was about an Earthling man and a woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zirconia 212."(SHV pg 201)

Okey, first of all Vonnegut doesn't explain this passage at all. He introduces it, and then he does his classical "And so on"(not literally). He is divulging his mystery of Billy's story. Why does he do this to the reader? Are we supposed to know why or how this is? It is so sudden that it strikes us, and we have no protection against this at all. something else is the name of the planet: "Zirconia". This means diamond. Is tis some time of message inferring to the german diamond? Vonnegut creates this "enygma" on porpuse to leave us clu less, and wanting more as always. 

And to compensate my previous entry on irony: 

"Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted build by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rablle-rouser. Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it. So it goes."(SHV pg 202) 

This is extremely ironic, for Jesus, as we all know dies in the cross, and he is commanded to craft one himself. It is some how like digging your own grave. It is "over ironical" and some how Vonnegut has to mean something deper than just Jesus and a time machine. I am hungry to find the deeper meaning.