Slaughterhouse-Five: Discussion III

Chapter 5: Time, trauma, and Tralfamadore

Chapter 5

• There is no plot, no structure, in Tralfamadorian books, just awe. This is another main argument of the book that is worth deconstructing, and I’m having a hard time understanding what to make of it. Billy is a victim of time, of linear thinking, of cause and effect. But the Tralfamadorians don’t see moment by moment, they see the big picture, and that is why they are sane. They don’t have notions of change, of plot and structure, only notions of beauty (88). Their books are still beautiful and surprising and deep, works of intention by the author, but fundamentally different from earthly books in that they don’t have a beginning or end, don’t have a moral, no cause or effect. Human books need an active protagonist, one who challenges an unjust system in the name of good, but to Tralfamadorians such depictions are in vain.

• Is this description of the Tralfamadorian books an attempt by Billy’s conscious to reckon with America’s place in history? Maybe the grand picture is good, but its moral arc is meaningless to those who burned in the fires of Dresden. Is the source of Billy’s discontent partly a result of his failure to only look at the good, only look at the big picture?

• Is that why he fears the Grand Canyon? Is it his inability to understand and appreciate the whole picture, the entire beauty of it? Is he a hostage to the moment? Or is it just that the Grand Canyon, with the Colorado River cutting through it, is the ultimate reminder of time and erosion?

• In the Carlsbad Caverns, when he was 12, Billy remembers the radium dial watch. Radium comes up a couple of times in these chapters, a reminder of another tragic result of WWII, the threat of nuclear annihilation and the ghastliness of radiation poisoning. It must be hard for survivors like Billy and Vonnegut to reckon with the legacy of even greater destruction ushered in by WWII

• The description of the English prisoners who are in the middle of the camp, surrounded by Russian prisoners, is a fascinating one. They had not seen a women or a child in over four years, nor had they seen a bird. Just a totally unnatural way to live. It’s also yet another example of a prison. They’re everywhere: the zoo on Tralfamadore, the bug in amber, Billy’s marriage, the hospital rooms and most importantly—memory (94)

• More insight into Edgar Derby’s character—he’s old and wise, and expected to rise in the ranks quickly because of this. “But here he was on the Czechoslovakian border at midnight.” (92) Age and wisdom mean nothing in the warped world of war.

• That the Englishmen sing well together is no surprise. As the families did in Hooverville in The Grapes of Wrath, singing seems to be a way to build community and reinforce bonds, a form of protest. American slaves sang on the plantations, too. The importance of singing is universal, its essence the opposite of imprisonment (94)

• The Englishmen are all attempted escapees. However, instead of being punished, like one might inspect, they were rewarded. They’re muscular and well-fed, “among the wealthiest people in Europe, in terms of food” because of a mistake the Red Cross made. We’ve seen this inversion of cause and effect before, in the WWII movie that Billy watched. The Traflamadorians argue that there is no cause and effect at all, and this lends credence to their beliefs. The Englishmen are in a better position than so many others in the war not because of their own successful escapes but because of a clerical error. It’s more illogic, more senselessness, more winners and losers not based on their choices but random events. (This can be connected to Vonnegut’s critique of the American poor in later pages).

• “They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun.” I hate to make another Call of Duty reference but it fits. For example in Black Ops II you can earn the coveted diamond camo by acquiring enough headshots because nothing is more stylish than that. Or, to take another example Fortnite skins, which is a good example but an abomination of a game

• One last point I’d like to make about the Englishmen is the hospitality that they extend to the American prisoners by preparing the feast. We determined that hospitality in the face of adversity was one of the key themes of The Grapes of Wrath, a form of solidarity and community and resistance, just like singing. Those same themes apply here

• Each tumbler was filled with warm milk. Milk was a symbol in Grapes, too, for birth and motherhood and sustenance. In Slaughterhouse-Five to represent more the infantilization of soldiers like Billy, a desire to return to an innocent, unthinking state

• The candles made from the fat of Holocaust victims is a morbid but necessary touch— reminding us that despite the rosy scene we’re still amidst a war. That human fat is made into soap and candles is horrifying, but calls to mind the animal products we use and consume daily without a second thought to the conditions that brought them into existence. It’s another link to the theme of man as cattle, man as expendable (96)

• Billy has no idea where he is at the banquet table with the soldiers. They watch them put on a play of Cinderella and he loses it at the line, “Goodness me, the clock has struck—Alackday, and fuck my luck.” What is it about this line that sets him off in particular? What connection can we make to the theme as a whole? (98)

• Billy ends up in the hospital. It’s clear his mental break is worsening. It seems to all have been started on the train. I also wonder if the description of the Englishmen, these strong, swashbuckling and well-fed men, is even accurate at all. Did they actually perform Cinderella? How delirious is Billy?

• The back-and-forth between the prison hospital bed and the psych ward bed presents an intriguing framing device and an obvious link between the two memories. These scenes are worth digging into.

• Billy winds up in the psych ward, 3 years after the war’s end. He had committed himself in his final year of optometry school: “Nobody else suspected he was going crazy.” Another indictment of the whole “return-to-normalcy” ethos, the idea that these men who had witnessed horrific things would be fine just coming home and diagnosing astigmatism for the rest of their lives. (100)

• The doctors blame Billy’s mental suffering on his father throwing him into the deep end of the pool, and taking him to the Grand Canyon, but not the war, never linking the trauma to Billy’s mental state. It’s the same as the humans inability to understand the Tralfamadorians perspective on time—just completely outside of perspective and comprehension of those who have no experienced it (100)

• Another argument could be made that Billy’s perception was widened by the war, his understanding of the depth of human depravity changed, yet he’s now expected to return to his hometown and live a banal, less perceptive life that fails to even acknowledge the questions he faced during the war. The war is over and that is that! No reckoning necessary! Now pop out a kid and get after that 9-5, even if Dresden is still in rubble.

• In the psych ward, a bird says to Billy “Poo-too-weet”—allegedly the last words in the book. Remember: there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Is it a reminder to Billy not to try to make sense of the experiences that left him and 29 others in a mental hospital?

• The man in the bed next to Billy in the psych ward is Eliot Rosewater, who introduces Billy to Kilgore Trout, a science fiction author. His work must be the inspiration behind Billy’s fantasies. (100)

• Rosewater finds life meaningless, too, like Billy. What is mental illness if not the inability to find purpose and meaning in life? Billy’s horror is Dresden; Rosewater’s is different, distinct, but just as destructive: he mistakenly shot a 14-year-old fireman.

• “So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.” (101)

• Rosewater is the central character in another of Vonnegut’s novels, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

• I want to dig into this reference of about The Brothers Karamazov because it definitely matters but I haven’t read it. I want to, but if I took that up now, this book club would immediately fail because it’s a monster. It’s also about patricide, at least plot-wise, so I’m wondering the significance here. If anyone has read and and wants to take a stab at it, please do.

• I also will say I have gotten around to reading Tolstoy last year and everybody should read him. It’s incredible stuff, and accessible. I liked Anna Karenina more than War and Peace.

• Rosewater says to the psychiatrist: “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.” Billy and Rosewater are two men unable to live with the lies anymore, lies of good will and humanity and meaning (101)

• Billy covering his head while his mother visits him in the mental ward is a distressing image of this reversion to infancy (102)

• Rosewater is holding onto a book Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension: It’s about people whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them. War. War war war war war. This is directly speaking on the experience of those who came back from the war with PTSD, as we already outlined above with the doctors’ diagnosis of Billy. This seems to be a main thrust of the novel—the war veteran as an outsider, as alien. (I typed these exact words in one of The Grapes of Wrath notes. It’s interesting that both books tell stories of men who became outsiders in their own countries, one through economic disenfranchisement and the other through war

• Derby is reading the The Red Badge of Courage by Billy’s bedside. More characterization of him as learned, thoughtful, someone who wants to understand war more deeply, an ironic portrayal given his execution over a teapot. Also an interesting contrast between Rosewater reading sci-fi and Derby reading fiction (105)

• Speaking of which, it’s revealed that Billy was a direct witness to Derby’s execution, done by a firing squad of 4 men, one of whom was given a blank cartridge. One of the reasons for the blank cartridge is that allows each shooter to maintain plausibly deniability that he was the one who fired the fatal shot

• Another invocation of “The Children’s Crusade”—this time uttered by the colonel who visits Billy and Derby at the bedside. “War is fought by babies….It’s the Children’s Crusade” (106)

• Loved the language of “artificial weather” used to describe the battle in which Derby was captured, the knives and needles that showered down—the language attaches a sort of unreality to the experience of war, once again casting it as something difficult if not impossible to comprehend

• Billy’s wife, Valencia, at his bedside, is described as a symptom of his disease. Even his proposal to her manifests as this out-of-body, mechanical experience, where he is just going through the motions. Is this more commentary on free will? Was Billy always bound to fall into such a relationship given his need for comfort and money? How many men returned from the war and got married without even yet coming to terms with their experience, starting off “the rest of their lives” on the wrong foot?

• Valencia offering Billy candy in the hospital is another portrayal of him as childlike, and she as motherly, doting…an affection that is maternal in nature rather than romantic (108)

• One of the Trout novels tells the story of an alien who visits earth to study “Why Christians found it so easy to be cruel.” We saw a clear-cut example of Christian cruelty in the treatment of Rosasharn in The Grapes of Wrath. Doesn’t seem like these American authors like Christianity all that much. Hmmm. Is it because it was Christians who dropped the bombs on Dresden? Is it because of the horrible thing God does to his people in the name of love and salvation?

• The whole crucifixion about lynching and nobodies and “A bum who has no connections” seems to be asserting the importance of everybody, ascribing a sort of divinity to everybody that contrasts religious teaching, but I’m not sure if I got that one totally right. It was a bit too satirical for me. (109)

• Talking about Billy’s diamond he got in the war that he gave to Valencia, Rosewater says that that’s what makes war attractive: “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.” Here too is a sort of grandmotherly language disguising the grim reality of war. Similar to Valencia with the candy at the bed side. (111)

• Billy is 44 when he is displayed at the zoo, a “memory” that is perhaps the height of his delusions. He is naked and on display in front of a crowd of Tralfamadorians. This again is that recurring theme of man as an animal, man as caged, taken to the extreme. That he is naked reminds us of the prison showers too and is certainly linked to that. But the image also calls to mind victims of the Holocaust who too were stripped and experimented on, treated as animals.

• “Most Tralfamadorians had no way of knowing that Billy’s body and face were not beautiful. They supposed he was a splendid specimen. This had a pleasant effect on Billy, who began to enjoy his body for the first time.” (113) Is this a comment on beauty standards for men?

• Billy admitting to the guide that he is as happy on Tralfamadore as he was on Earth is an indicator of his total detachment from the human experience, his complete alienation from it (114)

• FIVE SEXES ON TRALFAMADORE. Almost ripped my copy in two there holy shit. Unbelievable, these American authors. First Steinbeck with the Communism, now this. (114)

• Seriously, though, is that detail a rejection of black and white, good and evil, and instead an assertion of universality and community? It could be, in its own weird way.

• Time is incomprehensible to the Tralfamadorians, just as their concept of reproduction is to Billy, just as mental illness is incomprehensible to the doctors (115)

• The whole bit on page 115 about looking at a mountain range and Billy having his head encased in a sphere, also while strapped to a flatcar on rails, seems to be another critique of man’s limited perception, only able to experience time sequentially

• It also calls attention to Billy’s trauma, some of which is certainly a result of his harrowing experience in the box car, where his visage was also limited by the ventilator. Vonnegut comments that whatever Billy witnessed through the pipe, “He had no choice but to say to himself, ‘That’s life.’ It sounds a lot like The Allegory of the Cave, speaking to man’s inability to see beyond his own experience. But was the portrait of life Billy had through the box car door necessarily wrong? It also seems to symbolize that detachment, that shrug, that reluctance to point blame and to assert that the world should be a different, better place.

• “I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time.” The most shocking, vivid description we’ve gotten yet of the horrors witnessed by Billy during the Dresden bombing, and a strong insight into the source of his mental anguish. Pure evil in the name of fighting pure evil. A strong indictment of war, perhaps the crux of the whole novel. (116)

• The Tralfamadorians tell Billy the world ends when one of their test pilots presses a button “and the whole universe disappears.” It can’t be prevented, they say, because “the moment is structured that way.” The nuclear football is a button designed to be pushed. The fate of the world is a product of the structures and the systems we build. Mutually assured destruction sure sounds nice and rosy in theory, but combat systems and weapons are built only for destruction. This seems to be yet another comment on the terrible legacy of WWII, the existential dread and fear that defined the nuclear age. To build these weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent seems like less of a good option than, I don’t know, not having them at all. (117)

• The Tralfamadorians have had wars in their past, but can’t do anything about them, so they “spend eternity looking at pleasant moments.” A clear parallel to Billy, and the American psyche at large, that prefers to ignore rather than confront past horrors. The clear and obvious example is the bombing of Dresden. But Americans massacred civilians in Vietnam, too. They treated captives like animals during the Iraq War (nakedness and all). All in the name of fighting evil.

• The narrative shifts to yet another scene in a bed, the night of Billy’s wedding to Valencia. Vonnegut comments that one result of the night would be the conception of Billy’s son, Robert Pilgrim, who will become a Green Beret. Interesting detail here that while Billy was a chaplain his son will meet the heigh of military skill (118)

• “I never thought anybody would marry me,” says Valencia, a sad bit of characterization, considering Billy thinks it was a mistake. In her own way Valencia is also a casualty of the war, her own life’s trajectory distorted by a veteran’s failure to assimilate because of his trauma

• Billy knows that his marriage to Valencia will be “bearable all the way,” but I wonder if this is true or just another example of his “time-travel” or omniscience obscuring the truth. Earlier he described her as a symptom of his disease. We know that he cheats on her. So I question what the true nature of their relationship is (120)

• Their relationships’s contrast with that of the beautiful honeymooners is unmistakable. Seems to be speaking of the wealthy and their romantic notions, “loving each other and their dreams and the lake,” the total opposite of the pairing of Billy and Valencia which is rooted in convenience and optometry. It might be a reach, but the couples’ connections with Newport, RI and JFK seems to suggest a link to the ruling class as well, those (like Kennedy) who sent “children” to war in the name of freedom. The privileged class can enjoy such romantic notions because their perception of reality has not been shattered. They’re separated, removed from suffering in a way that Billy Pilgrim was not.

• Valencia trying to talk to Billy about the war while her baby takes on attributes of Green Beret inside of her contributes to the idea of war as timeless, generational, inevitable, innate, natural

• “It would sound like a dream,” Billy responds to her inquiries. More detachment, more illustration of his experience in the war as unreal, severed from normal human experience, and, again, impossible to understand for somebody who did not experience it (121)

• Valencia is also “proud” that Billy was a soldier, a part of his history that Billy feels no pride in himself. She, like many Americans, clings to notions of patriotism and duty, while having no understanding of the reality on the ground, among the bombs and the rubble

• We learn during this exchange that Billy buried Derby after his execution, and his connection with Derby seems to be becoming an even bigger piece of the puzzle, another terrible moment that has stayed with him and impacted him

• “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” That’s the epitaph that both Billy and the author decide would be fitting for their tombstones. It’s about the human capacity for denial, Tralfamadorian in its perspective. Like the aliens, like his country, like his fellow soldiers, Billy exists in a society that insists on moving forward, on focusing on the good, on never reckoning with its crimes and horrors. Is his mental illness the result of this disconnect, between what he knows to be true and how he is expected to live?

• What do we think of the words of the German propagandist on pages 128-130? I’ve seen this circulated online in screenshots a lot recently: “It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor.” Not to agree with a Nazi propagandist, but I’d argue that it’s an accurate sentiment. He goes on to discuss the self-loathing amongst American poor, the myth of the ease of making money, the “poor that don’t love another because they do not love themselves”—basically another description of the mantra of “rugged individual” we saw in Steinbeck’s work. The human (or American) tendency to place a man’s misfortune solely at his own feet instead of outside forces is baked into our national consciousness, a worldview that allows us to deny responsibility for his condition, much like the soldier in the firing squad tells himself he fired the blank. BOOM.

• This is an obvious attack on the mantra of the American Dream and American opportunity, but I will say it feels a little bit out of left field. Would love thoughts on the propagandist Howard W. Campbell, Jr. and his work. His memoirs make up another of Vonnegut’s novels, Mother Night

• The jump back to 1968 with Billy writing to the newspapers and distressing his daughter, Barbara. “Oh my God, you are a child,” she says about him sitting in the cold. Billy was a child during the war but reverts to a child as his memories take over. Or was he a child this whole time?

• Is Billy’s tryst with Montana Wildhack a distorted memory of his one-time infidelity, a manifestation of that guilt? He doesn’t really seem to feel guilty

• Also, Vonnegut just dropping that Billy has a hog had me dying. But maybe it’s also another reinforcement of the theme, a violation of expectations—in this backward world even a weakling can be packing

• Love how he compared the relief of Montana’s body to the architecture of Dresden. Amazing detail and possibly a window into how Billy is tortured by loss and the past even in the most visceral moment (133)

• At the end of the chapter, Billy tells the young dental patient whose father killed in Vietnam that he is still alive and that he would see him again. I guess the main question I have is this: Does Billy believe this? Are the teachings of the Tralfamadorians true? Or is this perspective of time and moments just a manifestation of Billy’s refusal to come to grips with loss: the beautiful architecture of Dresden, of the old and wise Edgar Derby, of his now-grown children, of his own childlike innocence?

That concludes our discussion points for chapters 4 and 5. It was a lot, but we can see the story coming together and the main themes emerging pretty clearly despite the story’s fragmented nature. We have the execution of Edgar Derby, the vengeful machinations of Paul Lazzaro, and the bombing of Dresden all hanging over the narrative, coalescing slowly, piece by piece. But we still don’t know what all this will mean for Billy in the end.

Will he find peace? Will he find meaning? Will he turn his gaze to only the good and beautiful and live in ignorance? Will he confront the past, whatever that may mean, or will he succumb to its tragedy?

Our next discussion post will be on Monday, March 16 for chapters 6, 7, and 8. It’s about 50 pages, and should bring us close to the end of the story. Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll see you all in the comments.

Steve