Edgar Derby is by far the most developed and “normal” character in respect to what readers usually experience. Vonnegut writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now"(164). This quote is a rather unorthodox and self-deprecating quote from the author himself about the characters that he has worked to develop. Derby could be categorized as the antithesis of the book, a person that seems to be on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of the theme of deterministic stoicism and the idea that life is meaningless that Vonnegut has developed and molded throughout the whole novel. However, rather than Derby take away from Vonnegut’s overall message, Derby re-enforces the meaningless of life, by contrasting the idealistic American soldier: Edgar Derby, the “John Wayne” (14) kind of soldier, in an abundantly romanticized kind of war that will "be fought by babies like the babies upstairs"(14), with the actual soldiers that fight in it: Billy Pilgrim, Roland Weary, Wild Bob, and Paul Lazzaro.

The strong, courageous, and honorable man that Edgar Derby is, ultimately meets his end for stealing a teapot in Dresden, resulting in the execution of the only ideal soldier in this war, rather ironically since 135,000 mostly innocent civilians were murdered by the supposed "Good" American forces in an airstrike, yet there is still violent punishments against an honorable man for the trivial crime finding a teapot. This further reinforces the point that no matter your morals, your background or your beliefs, everyone dies, so why try and fight fate? Derby's death had been referenced multiple times before the actual event occuring in the story, and despite the buildup, the actual death was just a minor portion of a page, and only simple sentences, illustrating how even the "best" and "most honorable" men still die a trivial and valueless death, and the simple sentence structure connects the futility of life and inevitability of death with the meaningless of war. Just as the birds say "poo-tee-weet"(215) in response to the mass of death, because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre"(19), Slaughterhouse Five is simply one big, secular memoir about the futility of attempting to make life meaningful if nothing ever matters in the end and everything is already predetermined.

Edgar Derby was meant to be a character that we could understand and empathize with, and in our attempt to connect with him, we begin to see how stoic characters like Billy and the Tralfamadorians are, and it also allows us to contrast this ideal American soldier with what most of the other characters were; scared and immature boys, just like Roland Weary. Vonnegut utilizes Derby in an extremely effective, but not blindly obvious way, and just like the rest of the novel, the more you dig into the details and hidden meanings of his characters and style, the more of Vonnegut's beliefs and messages begin to come into view. In creating one single character that we manage to understand, Vonnegut uses Derby as a microscope, making us see themes that weren't visible before, forcing readers to subconsciously compare Derby's life to all of the other more unconventional people that Vonnegut has in Slaughterhouse Five.