Throughout Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut has expressed his anti-war ideas, which culminate in an anti-climactic end like no other! After Dresden is bombed, Billy still shows little emotional reaction to the death and despair of the citizens of Dresden, preferring instead to focus on the positive moments much like a Tralfamadorian novel. Of the few moments where Billy Pilgrim chooses to show emotion is when he is shown the condition of the horses transporting him, such that he weeps for their pain.
Vonnegut continues expressing the strong anti-war message, depriving us of any emotion as he portrays the corpse mines and the destruction caused by the fire-bombs inflicted upon Dresden. The American prisoners and the German soldiers become allies such that they are only trying to survive and not achieve revenge or harm to their enemies, while the American soldiers, who far outnumber their German captors, become emotionless in that they do not react to the suffering which occurs around them.
I found Derby's death quite uninspiring as well, since Vonnegut built up the climax such that Derby was expected to have a heroic death, yet he is caught stealing a teapot from the catacombs, is arrested and later shot by a firing squad for something seen as a minor and inconsequential action in a wartime conflict.
I don't know what could possibly be "inspiring" about Derby's fate--although, thanks to the "Tralfamadorian style," it doesn't take us by surprise--but also don't see where Vonnegut ever sets us up to see it as "heroic." He (somewhat ironically) calls it the anticipated "climax" of the novel, but not in the conventional sense--more like, his portrait of war as absurd and brutal and crushingly stupid culminates in this most pointless of deaths, the death of a decent man whose decency and high ideals can do nothing to save him from his fate. (And we see it as "fate," thanks to the telescoping narrative style.) So it's an antiwar climax in an antiwar novel. Heroism doesn't enter the picture.
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