Slaughterhouse-Five: Discussion IV
Chapters 6-8: A fairy tale, a plane crash, and a barbershop quartet
Initial thoughts
We hit on some heavy stuff in this chapter, and finally see Billy’s experience in Dresden in full. It’s the key to the whole narrative and it’s deeply tragic, but it sheds some much-needed light on whole story, and why Billy is the way that he is. Of course, it also leaves us with even more questions, so let’s get down to it.
Chapter 6
This chapter begins with Billy being captivated by an “animal magnetism” emanating from his coat. There are two lumps in the lining of the coat, one shaped like a pea an one a tiny horseshoe. What do we think these items could be? (137)
Billy receives a message from the lumps “carried by the radiations. He was told not to find out what the lumps were. He was advised to be content with knowing they could work miracles for him, provided he did not insist on learning their nature.” The use of “radiation” here makes me wonder if it’s a comment on the nuclear age and the potential for destruction that was unleashed by WWII.
Disturbing story Lazzaro tells about the dog and the steak. I mean this guy is one sick fuck. Vivid characterization, though? What do we make of this?
For one I feel like Lazzaro’s fantasy of being some sort of like mob boss might be his own way of coping with the war. Billy’s alternate reality is Kilgore Trout. Is Lazzaro’s The Godfather?
The dog bite/clock springs steak parallels the mindset of the countries that fought WWII, a never-ending cycle of revenge and reprisals. Germany provoked the war just as the dog bit Lazzaro, but did the dog deserve a torturous death, did the people of Dresden?
Is Lazzaro a symbol for how war desensitizes us to horrors, and how we justify those horrors in the name of revenge? (139)
Lazzaro talks about enacting his revenge on the Blue Fairy Godmother and Billy, too: “He’ll settle down. A couple of years’ll go by…” before there’s a knock on his door and he’s shot.
He tells Billy the same, calling him “kid”: “Nothing’s gonna happen for maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years…” Lazzaro’s delayed revenge is a representation of the war coming back to haunt the men that fought in it. Something that may lie dormant for many years but something whose consequences they are unable to escape, whether those consequences me physical or mental. This opposes the solution to the war offered up throughout the novel, of moving back home, marrying, getting a job. The effects of war reach long past the date of its peace treaty. Judging how Billy’s daughter, Barbara, witnesses his mental deterioration, these effects can reach down into generations
A Balkanized United States, divided so it “will never again be a threat to world peace.” Chicago, hydrogen-bombed. Is this reality? Or is this the logical result of the destruction Billy saw unleashed at Dresden? Is that why the US is a threat to world peace?
Billy knows the day of his death: “will die, has died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976.”
Billy on his own death: “If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.” Billy’s words here moments before his supposed death strike at the tension at the heart of the novel, the conflict between the human view of time and that of the Tralfamadorians, of free will and fatalism. But which is true? Though Billy espouses the nonlinear nature of time as correct, his suggestion that death is not a terrible thing and should not be protested is opposite of everything Billy experienced in the war. The destroyed architecture, the tens of thousands killed. From our perspective and Billy’s, these are terrible, permanent things.
It has to be like this, so there is no point in confronting it.
Cinderella’s slippers as airmen boots painted silver. The Cinderella connection is worth mentioning, with Billy likened to her and the major to the godmother. But what does it mean? Is it meant to indicate a sort of unreality to the events of the war the men find themselves in? Does it represent fantasy as a means of escape? Or is it more the human tendency to find meaning to inject meaning where there is none?
The glass slipper always fits. In Cinderella the shoes fits, the fantasy becomes reality, there is meaning, there is purpose, that comes from Cinderella’s magical night. But in war there is no resolution, the owner of the shoe is not found.
Speaking of shoes, one of the most harrowing exhibits about WWII that I’ve witnessed was the in United States Holocaust Museum, which has a display containing piles and piles of victims’ shoes. An experience that defies words.
English major’s advice on staying a live seems to mimic this denial state—polishing boots, brushing teeth, checking his posture. Yet he’s still a prisoner who hasn’t seen a tree or flower or woman or child in five years. He envies the troops going to Dresden, a beautiful city “where the life is.”
Derby is elected as the head American, the only nominee, praised for his “maturity and long experience.” Derby promises to “make damn well sure that everybody got home safely”—sounding like an American officer. He’s met with disgust by Lazzaro. These two men have adopted two different concepts of war—one idealism, the other cynicism. Derby thinks wisdom and age and intelligence have value in the war, Lazzaro only violence
The hobo in the grass, his boots taken, his bare feet blue and ivory. “It was alright, somehow, his being dead. So it goes.” The Tralfamadorian way to view everything: don’t question, don’t wonder, just accept. (148)
Love the description of Dresden, the city around whose destruction the whole story turns: “The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd." It looked like a Sunday school picture of Heaven to Billy Pilgrim.” A holy, magnificent place destined to be destroyed
Liked the bit of Vonnegut in the boxcar calling Dresden, Oz, and comparing it to the only other city he’d seen, Indianapolis. It hints at the absurdity of the war, that the second city a young American from the midwest would ever see would not be Chicago or New York but a city in Germany
The reference to Oz is perfect, too, especially considering the
It’s a nice touch that the “grandfather” in the squad watching Billy was an architect, considering that is what Dresden was known for. It’s also interesting to view through the lens of age. The grandfather had a life before he was swept up into the war, he once contributed to the culture, he built. Billy, however, was a kid when he was swept up into the war. He was never given the chance to create, only to destroy (149)
Also, the grandfather in the squad with his grandson: war as generational, inevitable
That the Germans are first afraid of the “murderous American infantrymen,” they relieved to find “more crippled human beings, more fools like themselves.” A broader anti-war message here, one that points out that the soldiers shooting each other are often normal men, architects and schoolteachers, swept up into war by the forces of history
I’m curious about the different afflictions assigned to the three Americans when being assed by the Germans. Billy is still in his Cinderella get-up, looking “at least sixty years old.” Lazzaro has a broken arm, “fizzing with rabies.” And Derby is “mournfully pregnant with patriotism and middle age and imaginary wisdom.”
We touched on this above but it’s the way they are coping, war has demented each in his own way. Billy has given in to fantasy. Lazzaro was bitten by the rabid dog of war and now, naturally, is rabid himself. And Derby clings to the ideals of patriotism and wisdom and meaning in the cause
“Pregnant” seems intentional here, too— do those like Derby return from the war and pass down those same ideals to their children, unable to actually come to terms with what they witnessed. It’s described as an affliction, the patriot gene passed down from generation to generation, expressed by the father in WWII,the son in Vietnam
The people watching Billy in amusement, giving life to the city, will soon be dead
Billy’s appearance is questioned by a surgeon on the street, but Billy is only confused. “Fate” costumed him. Again here is the rejection of free will, of choice
Billy returns to the lumps in the coat—which he pulls out: A two-carat diamond and a partial denture. What could be the significance of these two items?
Slaughterhouse-Five. A shelter for pigs about to be butchered, now a “home away from home” for American POWs. Men as pigs, men as things destined to be butchered.
Chapter 7
The airplane crash referenced earlier, that Billy survives, is finally here—how does Billy know that the plane is going to crash? Is it more that he knows the flight will trigger an episode? Is it the act of being in a plane, since planes dropped the bombs?
To the Tralfamadorians, “every creature and plant in the United States is a machine." They’re amused that Earthlings take offense to that. Here again is the central conflict of the novel, the Tralfamadorian perspective versus our own. Are we machines? Are we not responsible for our own actions? Or is that the only way that Billy can make sense of the the world?
The barbershop quartet on the plane seems significant—they must have some connection to the war. But what?
Billy witnessed the Pole being hanged three days after arriving at Dresden. A Polish farm laborer hanged for sleeping with a German woman. A reminder how war punishes otherwise good and natural relationships, and how a system that bombs and slaughters indiscriminately is simultaneously capable of cruel and methodical execution as well (155)
Billy flashes back to Roland Weary banging his head against the tree, where Billy said, “You guys go on without me.” Where it all began, where he first became unstuck in time.
The ski resort that the plane crashes into mirrors WWII, with German-speaking Austrian ski instructors. The young people skiing are almost described as alien, with enormous boots and goggles, “bombed out of their skulls with snow.” Billy thinks he is in a new phase of the war
Billy is operated on by a surgeon in Boston. But did the plane crash actually happen? Or did Billy experience what might be his worst breakdown yet on the plane? (157)
The true things Billy dreams of are “time travel”— his memories of the war
Was struck by the description of Billy’s first night in the slaughterhouse for a couple of reasons. First, there is again the obvious linkage of the men with the slaughtered animals: they push the cart between empty pens for animals, its axles greased with dead animal fat
Second is the description of Dresden, “blacked out because the bombers might come,” so that Billy is unable to witness the beauty of the lights blinking on one by one. Just a perfect embodiment of war, played out nightly across the globe during the years of the war. The suppression of light, the stifling of human flourishing and activity, how we are made to hide instead of shine. Just totally unnatural. Although I guess electric lights are technically unnatural, but you get the point
Billy doesn’t get to witness the city lights reflected by the Elbe, either. Another small tragedy.
Werner Gluck as a younger Billy, a distant cousin—suggests a connection between the men fighting each other. We’re all distant cousins.
Gluck, Derby, and Billy are described as a “childish soldier”, “a poor old high school teacher,” and a “clown in toga and silver shoes”: Gluck as young, Derby as old, Billy as alien. Unlike the other two whose experience is still framed through their identities, Billy has become completely untethered from his (158)
This dynamic is outlined again a page later. The war widow asks Gluck if he’s too young to be in the army, asks Derby if he’s too old, but asks Billy what he is supposed to be. Is there an okay age for somebody to be fighting in a war or is it all stupid?
Billy, Derby, and Gluck pass through the communal shower where teenage girl refugees from Breslau, which has just been bombed, are showering. I hope these aren’t the same girls boiled alive in the water tower, but I’m guessing they most likely are. So it goes.
That this is the first time Gluck and Billy have seen a naked woman drives home the message of The Children’s Crusade— war deprives young men only of their lives and their limbs and their minds but of simpler pleasures, too, like the all-American rite of reaching second-base in the backseat of a car
The naked women is nothing new to Derby. He’s married and has sick body. He’s been around the block.
It’s not just an interesting scene to view because of what it tells us about Billy and Gluck, but also what it says about the horrors of war. These schoolgirls were bombed once and will be bombed again. That they are witnessed in their nakedness seems to be almost biblical imagery. They’re free of sin, as innocent as Billy, yet will still meet a horrific end
From showering in the steam —> to being boiled by it. War takes the good things like city lights and water and disfigures them into something dangerous
“Spooning was a crime”: the spooning of syrup has to be linked to image of men spooning on the box cars, and Billy’s spooning of his wife in bed, and now linked to the spooning of the syrup in the factory. “Spooning” links together separate moments in time, but also a symbol of survival and companionship
That the syrup the men sneakily spoons is for pregnant women furthers the theme of men as children, babies, out of place in a war
Derby bursts into tears at having syrup—suggesting that maybe even his ideals of age and wisdom could just be a front. Has war reduced Derby, too, to a child?
Chapter 8
We’ve seen Campbell, the American Nazi propagandist, earlier. He’s not recruiting American POWs for a German military unit, “The Free American Corps” to fight only on the Russian front. Is this commentary on the absurdity of it all, the nationalistic lines along which we fight and die for? Is it another hint at the post-war world in which the United States and the Soviet Union will clash?
Campbell is the perfect caricature of the American Nazi, his cowboy boots adorned with both swastikas and stars, a shoulder patch of Lincoln. An American ahead of his time, really.
He says: “Blue is for the American sky. White is for the race that pioneered the continent, drained the swamps and cleared the forests and built the roads and bridges. Red is for the blood of American patriots which was shed so gladly in years gone by.” (163) This man is all about draining the swamp, too! Ahead. Of. His. Time.
Seriously, though, this seems like a good statement for The Great American Book Club to break down. What do we make of this?
Blue: It’s not the color of the American sky; it’s the color of the sky. Seems to suggest a self-centeredness, a righteousness about America and its place in the world. The sky is also in this novel a place of terror, from which from American planes rain down.
White: Some thinly-veiled white supremacy here, not to mention endorsement of Manifest Destiny and the destruction of Native Americans that followed. Sorry, but it’s true. No picture of Americans who “pioneered the continent” is accurate unless it also grapples with the destruction of Native Americans that followed. It’s the same logical disconnect as the one that allows the American generals to shrug at the bombs falling on Dresden, on Vietnam in the name of security and world peace. The color white represents a convenient history for Campbell, a pure and innocent image of what the country once was and should continue to be. The roads and bridges touted by Campbell—the progress—is all that matters because that is what defines American greatness. The devastation is just a side effect.
Red: The red represents the blood of American patriots. But why does it not represent the blood of Americans right now? If Campbell is so patriotic why is he working with the Nazis? I think his conflicting nature is intended to mirror America’s own morals, twisted by notions of war and patriotism that permitted it to commit terrible acts in the name of justice. I think it also stems in part from his disillusionment with the United States itself, as he outlined in his work, chiefly the lack of dignity given to the poor. Is Campbell simply a self-serving actor in an amoral world, meant to shine a light on American hypocrisy?
Campbell says, “You’re going to have to fight the Communists sooner or later. Why not get it over with now?” A humorous take on the cyclical nature of war, the Cold War looming over the horizon, somewhat Tralfamadorian in how its depicted as an inevitability. (164) Was it an inevitability though? Was there a way out of WWII that didn’t result in another power struggle?
“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.” War strips man of his individuality, his agency. (164)
Notably, Derby becomes a character in his confrontation with Campbell. He calls him a snake, but then claims Campbell is less than a snake, because “he could help being was.” Thus Derby rejects the Tralfamadorian perspective, both in his own way as a “character” and with his words, in which he calls out the American Nazi as somebody who is responsible for his choices. Derby does not accept injustice as the way of the world but as a product of man.
Perfect flourish by Vonnegut toward the bottom of hte page, where Derby’s poetic words about American ideals and fighting Nazism are immediately followed by air raid sirens. It grounds the moment, slows it down. Derby may have these romantic ideals figured out in his head, but these same ideals have inspired terrible things.
The image of Trout managing newspaper delivery books and making sure they sell “the fucking Sunday edition, too” is hilarious (166)
Trout looks like a prisoner of war, a “cracked messiah” that Bill felt like he knew from Dresden
The money tree whose flowers are government bonds that attracted human beings who killed each other. I believe this is a critique of how the US government used the images of sacrifice and valor to fund the war, a sort of self-sustaining cycle
The Gutless Wonder — One of Trout’s novel, about a “robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured.” The robots, however, drop “jellied gasoline” on human beings from airplanes, a clear reference to the napalm of the Vietnam War. The robot appears human and mingles in society. Because he had no conscience, “nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable.” Seems to be a comment upon society’s tendency to humanize in some respects and dehumanize in others, whichever is most convenient. Halitosis is unforgivable to them. But the bombs dropped far away is totally fine. It’s more hypocrisy, more moral relativity, highlighting how we pick and choose what we protest against often in a way that will not shatter our worldview.
Does Trout’s refusal to think of himself as a writer mirror Billy’s own warped identity? How so? (169)
Love how Rosewater and Trout think that the other can’t right. Rosewater telling Trout he should be “President of the World”, childlike language. This is spelled out for us: Rosewater he writes like a fourteen-year-old, but was a captain in the war. The Children’s Crusade. Children fight wars, but does war also turn the men fighting back into children? Would seem to be the case with Derby and Rosewater. What do we make of this?
Trout tells Maggie that God is listening, and if she’s done more bad things than good things, she’ll “burn forever and ever. The burning never stops hurting.” Is this another subtle reference to Dresden, in the burning, in the judgment coming from the sky as punishment for “bad things.” Is it another critique of moral absolutism?
And here we have a barbershop quartet, again, whose “sour” chord induce a “psychosomatic response” in Billy
“He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.”
Is this the whole crux of the novel? The secret that’s linked to the barbershop quartet and the supposed plane crash on Sugarbush Mountain. Is the suppression of this secret the reason for Billy’s mental anguish? Is it the reason for Tralfamadore? What is the secret?
Trout calls it a time window but describes a memory. The Tralfamadorian perspective obscures the truth.
This scene of trauma is followed by Billy gifting Valencia the ring, the sapphire with the star in it. Valencia immediately takes the attention from Billy and I just know by her actions here that she would be an insufferable Instagram follow. But what is this meant to represent? The turning away from trauma. The giving into routine, to gifts and anniversaries and ceremony, the refusal to confront what ails us (174)
Billy thinks about why the quarter effected him so much. For the first time he remembers, a significant change of language of time that is usually used. This points to this memory as being the most important of the novel, if the title didn’t give it away.
The four guards in the meat locker with the POWs, take in the destruction “like a silent film of a barbershop quartet.” There is the connection, the link in time.
“Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody in else in the neighborhood was dead. So it goes.” A once bustling and beautiful city changed forever by the bombs—turned to rubble, deprived of life, forever severed from the earth, like Billy, like the moon
On Tralfamadore, the pregnant Montana Wildhack can’t send Billy to get ice cream because outside of the dome is cyanide (substitute for radiation), so she sends him to the fridge instead. A metaphor for war and destruction, and the desire for normalcy and family that overrides it all and allows us to live in ignorance: a refusal to view things as they are, even if pregnant in a zoo on an alien planet (179)
The paragraph on 179 where Billy describes Dresden cuts to the core of his trauma: the destroyed buildings, the people consumed by flames, the four guards who “in their astonishment and grief, resembled a barbershop quartet”
“It was like the moon.” A once stunning, beautiful place of human culture and life rendered alien, lifeless
“Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say.” There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Poo-too-weet.
Survivors in the city are described as a flaw, a keen insight into the utter destruction and intent of the Americans
The American planes strafe survivors—including the American POWs—in the aftermath of the bombing. Vonnegut describes that as an act “to hasten end of the war”, an absurd image considering the aftermath of the destruction. As if killing Billy or the people of Dresden would make any difference. It also sounds a lot like the argument that was used to justify the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and I think that’s intentional
The innkeepers at the edge of the city “understood they were on the edge of the desert now”—a lifeless place—but they do open for business, cleaning the glass and winding the clocks. That there is “no great flow of refugees” from the city—the cost of total war
The devastation finally confronted and acknowledged, the chapter ends with a familiar theme: hospitality
And that concludes chapters 6-8. We know how Billy’s life ends, and we now know exactly what happened in Dresden, but there are still some central questions to be answered. Mainly, will Billy ever be able to come to grips with the horrors he witnessed? Will he accept human agency and choice as reasons for these horrors or will that remain impossible for him? Is there anything intelligent to say about a massacre? Vonnegut is navigating the tension between determinism and free will masterfully, but I’m curious as to what his final conclusion will be, if there even is any. As always, please comment on whatever speaks to you and let me know what you think of any of my points which may very well be wrong.
This brings us to the end of the book, with only around 35 pages to go. Our final discussion post for Slaughterhouse-Five will be Tuesday, 3/25, followed by a wrap-up post in which we break down the central argument of the novel and how it relates to America.
Thanks for reading!