“They were grainy things, soot and chalk. They could have been anybody" (Vonnegut 205, 208).
Vonnegut uses this simple, redundant motif (repeated phrase) in Chapter 9. Attributing it to both Montana Wildhack's X-rated photos and her mother's image on her Serenity Prayer locket, he throws out the phrase randomly throughout the chapter as if those things were just not a big deal. I think that the motif goes deeper than just some black and white images of his Tramalfadorian mate's life. Vonnegut wrote that the pictures of the past "could have been anybody." The occurrence of that phrase in the same chapter as the description of the thousands of corpses in Dresden, many of which were unrecognizable, is not a coincidence. Those corpses "could have been anybody:" the milkman, the florist, the local weatherman, a child in school, a preschool teacher, the old maid next door. The firebombs did not discriminate in murdering the citizens; almost all were obliterated, burned alive, or slowly cremated underneath tons of metal and never to be seen again. The "logs" the soldiers saw on the ground "could have been anybody." Under the "soot and chalk" the thousands became invisible, just bodies on top of bodies, no longer individuals. In conclusion, I think that Vonnegut was calling to mind (with the casual, repeated motif) that any person, from Montana Wildhack to the German schoolgirls, could die in any circumstance at any minute. The motif ties together the deaths of all people on Earth, since all people must die eventually; and specifically links the quickly-occurring deaths of thousands of Dresden people in a matter of hours. More personally for Vonnegut, all the mangled corpses he dug up in Dresden "could have been anybody" and remain in his mind as just "grainy things, soot and chalk."
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