Chapter 8 incorporated many aspects of the book and helps sum up some loose ends. By doing so it delves into the adaptation of Billy over the years and some of the reasons he is the person he is. Vonnegut finally is compelled to explain what turned Billy from a depressed soldier into an institutionalized and unstable optometrist. Billy's daughter, Barbara, believes all Billy's talk of aliens and so forth are nonsense , as would anyone, and claims these ideas are because of Kilgore Trout who is an author who wrote many books using science-fiction persuasion. And Barbara is convinced Billy's psychotic transformation started with him. Please also remember all the talk of aliens and time travel is assumed to be real in the context of the book by Billy, however, other readers and I still contain some skeptism regarding whether these things are real or are purely figments of Billy's imagination and the result of a subsequent sleeping disorder. However, it is also after Billy witnesses the Dresden firebombing and 'time travels' to a future event that he his greatly effected and his mindset begins to be altered. I believe this is due to the events he witnessed as a soldier and a survivor of a bombing considered by many worse than that of Hiroshima. Through this change in Billy, Vonnegut is once again illustrating the effect of war on the mind. He is saying war not only affects people as it goes on but long after and quite often for an entire lifetime, that war is a completely horrific part of mankind.
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