Slaughterhouse-Five: Discussion V
Chapters 9-10: An Air Force historian, a tawdry book store, and a bird
Initial thoughts
These final chapters conclude the story, and in them we witness some of Vonnegut’s most damning indictments yet. American exceptionalism, American culture and the Tralfamadorian worldview are all exposed—and most importantly, Billy Pilgrim finds his voice.
Chapter 9
This chapter starts off hot with the death of Billy’s wife, Valencia. It’s hard not to view her as a tragic figure, a victim of the war in her own way. She cares about Billy, but we don’t really get the sense that she and Billy have anything really special. I feel like this disconnect has to be a result of them marrying so soon after the war, before Billy could even come to terms with his experience there. She was described earlier as a “symptom of his disease”, a heartbreaking description to consider as she drives to the hospitals in hysterics, and ends up dying
Vonnegut compares the sounds of the Cadillac missing the mufflers to “a heavy bomber coming in on a wing and a prayer.” Just a masterstroke of a simile from Vonnegut. It further plays into Valencia as another casualty of war, and touches upon the intrusiveness and inescapability of the war, even long after the last bombs have fallen
Valencia is slumped against the steering wheel, and her “horn brayed steadily”— A chilling sound that any of us who drove a little too recklessly in GTA will be familiar with. Also used to devastating effect in Chinatown
I wonder what the significance is of Valencia’s death. She is fine during the original rear end, she crosses the median and crashes, but survives that too, only to be suffocated by the carbon monoxide because of the interior of her car had changed. She “survives” the “plane crash” like Billy did—like he survived the war—only to suffocate at home, in the car designed with to provide safety for a collision but with no defense the unseen—the tasteless, odorless carbon monoxide. The wounds sustained in the war weren’t always fatal, but they changed men, in body, mind and spirit, in ways that would results in death later
Valencia was also hit by a Mercedes, a German car. Hmmm.
The man sharing a hospital room with Billy is Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, who broke his leg skiing. He’s seventy, has energy of a man half his age, and 23 year old wife, a veritable Belichick. He’s the twisted opposite of the young soldiers who were sent off to war to die, many of whom died virgins
Rumfoord is also a retired brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve and the Official Air Force Historian, and a professor. It’s useful to view his actions and words as a representation of the American military, specifically the Air Force
Rumfoord remarks that in his sleep all Billy does is “Quit and surrender and apologize and ask to be left alone.” — More indication of Billy’s trauma, and the root of Rumfoord’s disgust, even though Rumfoord has lived what seems to be a life of luxury. He broke his leg skiing; Billy’s plane crashed into a mountain with a ski resort and Billy thought he was back in Germany
Lily, Rumfoord’s girlfriend, is depicted in numerous ways as a child. Is she just another child crusader used by the rich and powerful for their own ends? Rumfoord knows very little about her except “that she was one more public demonstration that he was a superman.” It might be a reach but are Lily and Rumfoord microcosms for the larger American military dynamic, which too relies on public displays of superhumanness in the name of military might, a military of children? (185)
Lily can’t read the Truman statement about the dropping of the atomic bomb, so she pretends to. Is Lily’s illiteracy intended as a comment on American culture and education (which would be right at home today, in the era of the clip). Or is it meant to symbolize something deeper with regards to how young Americans perceive the Bomb? Or is it the simple fact that these children were born after the war, and as such have no comprehension of it?
The Destruction of Dresden - In the first discussion post I pointed out that Vonnegut’s claimed death toll was inaccurate and wasn’t sure why. Apparently this is because Vonnegut used Destruction of Dresden as a source, which is no longer considered authoritative. Its author was also apparently written by a Holocaust denier which is interesting
In the foreword to The Destruction of Dresden we witness the recurring justification of revenge, espoused by Rumfoord’s military friends: “I find it difficult to understand Englishmen or Americans who weep about enemy civilians who were killed but who have not shed a tear for our gallant crews lost in combat with a cruel enemy.” Why can’t we weep for both?
Also, “It might be well to remember Buchenwald and Coventry, too.” Horror begetting horror.
We’ve seen this attitude echoed by these generals explicitly linked to the American military before, with the the major who wanted to bomb North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age” because they were Communists, the enemy (60)
Air Marshall Saundy writes, of Dresden: “That it was really a military necessity few, after reading this book, will believe. It was one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances. Those who approved it were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand…” There again is that American detachment, that lack of accountability. It was just the way things played out, it wasn’t wickedness or cruelty, it was out of their control. The bombings were fated to happen; it’s the nature of war. Nobody made the choice to kill, nobody made the choice to slaughter innocents, the bombs falling were never meant to be cruel and indiscriminate, in spite of their design
The comment on those approving the bombings who were “remote” from the realities of war points squarely to that bastard Rumfoord, who spends all his time, skiing, sailing, and chasing tail half a century younger than him, all while resenting Billy for his weakness and trauma
After this passage from Saundy, which relays the death tolls of the bombing of Tokyo and Hiroshima, Billy says “If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob.” We kind of glossed over Bob the first time, the colonel who lost his entire regiment of 4500 men, “most of them children.” (66) What does this repeated phrase mean? It’s fantasy, a picture of war Bob did not experience. His men never actually called him Wild Bob—in fact they all died—yet he dreams of reminiscing with the boys back in his hometown when the war is over and they return home as heroes. It evokes the simply moving on from it, suburbia, good old boys throwing them back at home in the states, the same reminiscing Vonnegut at the beginning of the novel couldn’t partake in. And last the inability to face the truth. Wild Bob is both an example of the warrior mentality mythology that obscures the tragedy of war, and also a keen parallel to Billy in his complete inability to confront what he has witnessed
On page 189, Billy travels in time to when he was sixteen, in the waiting room of a doctor. The only the other person in the waiting room is an old man who can’t stop farting and burping. He says, “I knew it was going to be bad getting old. I didn’t know it was going to be this bad.” I feel like we have to view this ironically—Vonnegut remarking that compared to dying a horrible death in a war at 18—a little gas maybe isn’t all that bad. Better than mustard gas, at least.
Billy’s son, Robert, is “straightened out now” that he went off and joined the military. He’s not given much time in the novel, detached from Billy, a symbol of the ever-churning war machine’s need for youthful bodies. I wonder if his smaller part in the novel is meant to be a comment on his relationship with Billy and the war. I mean did Billy ever even play catch with this kid? Is Robert another casualty of WWII?
While in the hospital Billy’s mind races with “letters and lectures about the “flying saucers, the negligibility of death, the nature of time” — Tralfamadore as cope? (190)
Dresden was no secret to the Germans, or the Russians, who occupied Dresden after the war, who are in Dresden still” — a subtle comment on the cyclical nature of war, how the legacy of WWII extended far beyond its official end
Rumfoord wrote a volume about the history of the air force in WWII which barely mentioned Dresden, “even though it had been such a howling success.” Lily questions why it was kept secret, to which Rumfoord responds, “for fear that a lot of bleeding heats might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do.” Total denial—and indicative of a common thought process rife in American politics today—to cast those protesting inhumanity as bleeding hearts or socialists or Communists instead of examining in good faith the systems they critique
Billy responds to Rumfoord’s accusation of bleeding hearts. “I was there,” he says. This was the most powerful moment in the novel for me. It’s an assertion of agency for Billy, the first step to confronting the past, in admitting he was there, that he did experience something horrific. The controversy surrounding the bombing of Dresden is not one of political posturing; it’s about real human cost, and Billy speaks to that, courageously. It’s a rebuke of the official Air Force Historian, drunk on righteousness and patriotism, and therefore a rebuke of American military might at large. (191)
Lily is open to Billy’s words, but Rumfoord tells her it’s echolalia, which Vonnegut says is for his own comfort: “An inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.” The Germans in the way of American bombs were certainly inconvenient, their destruction justified in the name of rooting out the disease of Nazism
The hospital staff hates Rumfoord. They think he is a “hateful old man, conceited and cruel” who thinks that “people who were weak deserved to die.” The staff, on the other hand, “was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, and nobody should die.” The staff is driven by humanity, Rumfoord (and America) by ideology.
On page 193 we witness another confrontation between Rumfoord and Billy. Billy states in the middle of the night to Rumfoord, “I was in Dresden when t was bombed. I was a prisoner of war.”
Must we talk about it now? Said Rumfoord. He had heard. He didn’t believe.
We don’t ever have to talk about it, said Billy. I just want you to know: I was there.A reassertion of Billy’s agency and dignity again in the face of denial. Rumfoord is not interested in talking about it because it would shatter his own worldview, and would force him to confront the decisions his colleagues had made. The importance of Billy standing up to this man and asserting his experience against his false narratives is profoundly important to the novel
Two days after the war ends, Billy and five other prisoners ride around in a “coffin-shaped green wagon” — clear language that indicates these men as marked
“Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones—to stare only at the pretty things as eternity failed to go by. If this sort of selectivity had been possible for Billy…” And there it is: the rejection of the Tralfamadorian worldview; the same worldview that kept the bombing of Dresden out of the history books. (194)
As Billy snoozes in the back of the wagon, he is armed for the first time since basic training. The war continues for Billy. Will he finally have to fight?
The horses transporting Billy were suffering from thirst and gashes and broken hooves, treated by the Americans as no more sensitive than a six-cylinder Chevrolet. Livestock treated as robots, machines, means to an end—their suffering ignored
The two people that confront Billy about the horses were obstetricians, in fitting with the motif of babies and birth. They delivered babies until the houses burned down, and “now they were picnicking where their apartment used to be.” A devastating image.
“When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t cried about anything else in the war.” Why is it this that makes Billy cry? I want to say it’s the undeniable image of animal suffering—the same one symbolized by the slaughterhouse—that has such an effect on him. He’s desensitized to the suffering of man, but to see an innocent animal tortured and ignored and used as a “means of transportation” breaks the spell
Interesting callback to the epigraph— I wanted to speculate on this at the beginning to prove that I was a diligent reader but honestly had no idea what it was talking about. Here it is:
The cattle are lowing,
The Baby awakes.
But the little Lord Jesus
No crying he makes.
Now it makes perfect sense, linked with how Billy “cried very little, though he often saw things worth crying about.” There is no more innocent figure than the baby Jesus—no other figure more closely tied to conceptions of right and wrong, or more attuned to suffering. He’s born into a world with immense suffering, but he doesn’t cry. Why? Shouldn’t we cry? (197)
No piece of good old American literature is complete without a Christ figure, and it looks like Billy might be one, too. Is his a classic example? Billy suffers because of his innocence—his life sacrificed to absolve the sins of man
About the destruction of Dresden, Rumfoord tells Billy: “It had to be done. That’s war.” There is again, that framing of inevitability, that Tralfamadorian fatalism that insists there could have been no alternative, that absolves the perpetrator of guilt and responsibility.
“Pity the men who had to do it.” I mean, I do, but I’d rather drop a bomb than be underneath it. Why can’t we pity everybody involved in these inhumane endeavors?
Quick aside: Paul Tibbets, Jr. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima from his plane the Enola Gay, which was named after his mother. There’s something mighty twisted and ironic about the plane that dropped the atom bomb being named after a mom. (Photos of the Enola Gay were recently marked for deletion by the Pentagon because of DEI. If that isn’t just the heigh of absurdity.
“You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground.” — Says Rumfoord to Billy. Another scathing indictment of Rumfoord and his military cohort, symbolizing his detachment from the terror of their own actions. The suggestion of mixed feelings is especially rich and shows the extent of their delusions—the belief that a man on whom bombs fell and emerged on a place as flat at the moon would still retain that patriotism, that pride, that we really showed them even amongst the rubble and bodies
Billy’s response reinforces this assessment: “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore.” (198)
Forgive me, but I’m going to directly inject politics in the post here, only because it’s so relevant. I won’t bother going into the details of Signalgate, which is so absurd its stood out even above the cacophony of idiocy that’s been on display since mid-January. I just wanted to highlight one part of the conversation, featuring the Vice President and the National Security Advisor, concerning bombs dropped on Yemen:
The Vice President and the National Security Advisor, folks, collapsing an apartment building in the name of fighting terror, and celebrating with emojis—fire, fist bump, flag. He was the top missile guy. They’re attacking shipping. It had to be done.
I appreciated the image of Billy in his NYC hotel room on the top floor. Beyond the terrace was “air space over Forty-fourth street,” and the people Billy looked down on were “jerky little scissors. They were a lot of fun.” Billy sees the world from the perspective of a bomber, and it symbolizes that sense of detachment from destruction from those “not on the ground”
Billy flips through the channels but can’t find anything good to watch. He wants the later shows, when “that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It’s a little after eight o’clock, so primetime television (remember that), but all the shows were about silliness and murder. So it goes.” One, this shows Billy as still fundamentally out of sync with his fellow Americans, as he’s been depicted throughout. (200)
Silliness and murder — is Vonnegut right? Has much changed in our culture today. I mean let’s take Marvel as the most obvious example. It had a historic run. It’s murder disguised with sleek shields and spiderwebs, and nothing is sillier than the multiverse (at least as a narrative device). Speaking of which, the cast for was announced yesterday, and it includes Patrick Stewart, 84 and Ian McKlellan, 85, reprising their roles as Professor X and Magneto, this time amongst the Avengers. If that’s not silly I don’t know what is, but this is what the culture wants, I guess? Fan service and geriatric X-Men?
Billy seeks refuge in a book store: “In the window were hundreds of words about fucking and buggery and murder, and a street guide to New York City, and a model of the Statue of Liberty with a thermometer in it. Let’s break this one down.
Fucking and buggery and murder. In the interest of transparency, I had to look up “buggery” which my brain initially linked with “bugging out” or just sort of being a weirdo, but it is in fact anal sex. This adds to the portrait of America on the television screen as a country steeped in vice, an immoral land.
A street guide to New York City - Juxtaposed with fucking and buggery and murder, it’s the contrast of the ideal with the reality. New York is a sinful place but still a tourist attraction, a symbol of the American dream but a representation of its dark underbelly. A place of opportunity that lifts people up but drives others into the ground, literally and figuratively
The Statue of Liberty with a thermometer in it - Feels like this has to be read as taking the temperature of the country. Are our conceptions of liberty making us a bit too feverish?
“Power and sports and anger and death.” My man really is coming at America in these last view pages, dunking on both the government and the people. And not without cause. Power and sports and anger and death — an irrefutable description of our beloved NFL, from the fans fist-fighting in the stands to the quarterbacks having fencing responses on the field to the star linebacker killing himself years after his last game, the parallels to war are undeniable (200)
Don’t get me wrong, Tom Brady gave me some of the best years of my life, but football is a cultural phenomenon with casualties. Like, Tua, come on bro, just retire. We’re no different than the American military or the Tralfamadorians. We look at 28-3 or the Malcolm Butler interception, but we don’t look at Aaron Hernandez, we don’t look at the CTE, or Eli Manning
Billy in the peep show shop. Oh boy. The photos are Tralfamadorian because they’re stuck in time, like a bug in amber, they don’t change. Photos are better, because they’re stuck in time.
“Twenty years in the future, those girls would still be young, would still be smiling or smoldering or simply looking stupid, with their legs wide open.” An obvious parallel to the schoolgirls boiled in the water tower, who would also never grow old (200)
Page 201: Billy finds a Kilgore Trout novel that he had read in the veterans novel “about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on the planet of Zircon-212”—and there it is, the story behind Billy’s fantasies
I liked the image of the abducted Earthlings tracking their investments on earth, being stimulated by the fake stock market. A critique of our obsession with a symbolic wealth that will never really realistically belong to us, or maybe just a milder point about our obsession with money in general
And then we have the other Trout story about apprentice-carpenter Jesus who built a cross for the execution of a rabble-rouser. A neat little parable. What was Jesus if not a rabble-rouser? Has to be saying something about how the man makes tools for another’s destruction, never thinking they will one day come for him?
How does the Trout story end? With the time traveler confirming “The Son of God was dead as a doornail. So it goes.” Seems to be a pretty clear rejection of the resurrection, that’s for sure. Where does it fit into the larger narrative?
The quintuplets running the store give major McPoyle vibes (202)
The clerk “…had to tell the other clerks about the pervert who wanted to buy the window dressing.” Beautiful satire. (204)
Montana Wildhack is back, too, on the cover of the magazine Midnight Pussycats. So that explains her appearance on Tralfamadore, too.
The magazine was publishing “print pictures from blue movies” Montana had made as a teenager. Billy did not look closely at these. They were grainy things, soot and chalk. They could have been anybody.” Can’t help but make a connection here to the grainy wartime photos of soldiers who also could have been anybody. There seems to be a through-line in the novel between the bathing school girls, girls in the sex trade, and “child” soldiers. All victims of violence and vice in their own ways.
Billy goes on the radio show, whose topic is weather or not the novel is dead. Billy is booted for talking about flying saucers and Montana Wildhack. I wonder about the novel but here, is it just a sort of meta-commentary? What’s the point of including that detail?
He travels back in time for the last time (that we see) to Tralfamadore. Montana is breast-feeding their child because that’s a theme. It’s almost poignant how she speaks to Billy like a knowing wife, whose grown to understand him over the years: “You’ve been time-traveling again. I can always tell.” She knows that it wasn’t the war that he travelled too, either.
Billy talks to Montana about the “blue movie” she made. Her response is described as “Tralfamadorian and guilt-free”— an acceptance of her past, the refusal to feel bad about it, or to even question it or the choices that defined it
She tells Billy she heard about him in the war, how he was a clown, and how Derby was shot. She says, “He made a blue movie with a firing squad.” What do we think of the comparison between Montana’s videos and Derby’s execution?
She moves the baby from one breast to another because “the moment was structured that way.” But is it?
“They’re playing with the clocks again,” Montana says. Are the clocks just Billy’s mind, messing with his memories. It seems like it.
Page 209 - Nice rack.
Oh, yeah, the locket. Sorry, got distracted. It contains a photograph of Montana’s alcoholic mom—a grainy thing, soot and chalk, another link in the train of generational tragedy
The locket shares a quote: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things that I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference. And therein lies the philosophy underpinning this book. It’s not that the Tralfamadorians are right or that the Earthlings are right, it’s that they’re both half right. America couldn’t stop WWII, but it could stop the bombs from falling on Dresden. Billy couldn’t stop his enlistment, but he could find the courage to find his voice. Maybe there’s a reason I know three different girls with this quote tattooed across their ribcages—maybe it’s the truth.
Chapter 10
Chapter 10 shifts back to the first person perspective of Vonnegut, whose musings kicked off the story
He immediately invokes the assassinations of MLK and RFK—a touch on the violence that seemed to define the Vietnam era
“And everyday my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.” Military science — bit of an unsettling term that goes against the very idea of science, which is to sustain life
He also comments on the death of his father: “He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.” A comment on the irony of being a sweet man but also a gun nut, a contradiction that mirrors the American war machine: the leader of the free world who collects not guns but aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and missiles. (210)
“They rust” — seems to be an endorsement of disarmament which we’ve seen in this work earlier
The Tralfamadorians adore Darwin, who taught that "“those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.” It’s an exact echo of Rumfoord’s (and therefore America) words about weaklings, and it’s the exact philosophy the the whole book is working against. It’s the refusal to take accountability for the misfortunes of others, whether the hungry or the bombed—the insistence on fate, inevitability, that the world is just structured that way
We saw this in The Grapes of Wrath, too, the acceptance of injustice as a means of self-preservation, man’s refusal to acknowledge his part in the chain of disenfranchisement that renders his former neighbors hungry and destitute. We can’t help the role that we play, whether we’re piloting the Enola Gay or driving the tractor that crumbles our neighbor’s home
“If what Billy Pilgrim learned from Tralfamadore is true, that we all lie forever, no matter how dead we sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed.” What do we think of this admission from Vonnegut? I’m tempted to read it through the whole lens of “well without an end there wouldn’t be any meaning” but I think it’s a bit more cynical. I think Vonnegut is just saying life just really sucks sometimes (211)
“Still, if I’m going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.” Note this isn’t the Tralfamadorian perspective of only looking at the good moments, but a subtle acknowledgment that he visits the dark moments, too. Maybe he’d rather forget everything than live with the good and bad forever.
Vonnegut hits us with the Wild Bob line again, this time in response to the thought of how much money he and O’Hare made. Still, though, there’s no reminiscing, no glory, no camaraderie—just anguish
On the exploding global population, Vonnegut says to O’Hare: “I suppose they will all want dignity.” Isn’t that the whole fight?
The books ends with a flash back to Dresden, two days after the bombing, where Billy and Vonnegut both were put to work in the ruins.
The Germans were barricaded off from the ruins. “They were not permitted to explore the moon.” There’s the moon again, painting the former Oz-like city of Dresden as something alien, inhuman, barren, lifeless
Billy digs with a Maori and they strike upon a “corpse mine” with dozens and dozens of bodies in it: “They were sitting on benches. They were unmarked. So it goes.” The image of the “corpse mine” rivals that of the schoolgirls in the boiling water for the most haunting image of the bombings. That they were sitting on benches attests to their humanity and innocence.
And here, finally, is the origin of “mustard gas and roses”: it was the scent of decaying bodies, a smell that has no doubt stayed with the author. It makes sense, too. Nothing brings back memories more potently than a smell. I still have a bottle of Adam Levine eau de toilette I wore in college when I went to go strike out at the bars. Sometimes when I go out I’ll spray it on and I’m instantly transported to those times. Smell is powerful, and triggering
The Maori dies of dry heaving from the stench, so instead of sending down men to retrieve them they cremate them all with flamethrowers. An ironic fate, given the fire that consumed Dresden, and an undignified one (214)
Derby is shot for stealing the tea pot. He’s not just looting the ruins, like we thought, but “plundering the catacombs.” I mentioned this in a previous discussion but it’s interesting to view Derby’s trial and execution in light of the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter surrounding the men. It’s the kind of order and process he would likely respect, but at the same time absurd in its senselessness. The fact that it was over such a simple luxury as tea makes it even sadder. Is Derby a tragic figure? (214)
“And then, one morning, they got up to discover that the door was unlocked. World War Two in Europe was over.” Just like that—and now it’s back to suburbia.
“One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-too-weet?” There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
Wow. This was my third time reading Slaughterhouse-Five and I think it’s the first time I actually got it. It was a lot to take in, and some of the themes were difficult to track at first, but I think we ultimately landed on the novel’s main thrust. It’s an anti-war novel, yes, but more so a pro-human novel, one that declares, ultimately, the dignity of the sufferer, and a rebuke of those in power who cloak cold-blooded murder in language of patriotism, justice, and inevitability. It’s about memory, too. Confronting instead of suppressing our worst crimes and deepest traumas, so they don’t come back to haunt us.
“I was there,” says Billy Pilgrim to Rumfoord, the embodiment of American military might and memory. It’s the most profound act of defiance in the whole novel—even more so than Derby’s of Campbell—the assertion of one’s humanity, and the refusal to be just another faceless victim crushed under the wheels of history.
This concludes our discussion posts for Slaughterhouse-Five. There is obviously so much to talk about, and discussions can be started at any time and any one of the posts. I’m also going to be posting a shorter wrap-up post in which I will try to further break down what we found to be the central argument of the novel, and how it relates to our country today, so stay tuned.
Thanks to everybody who has participated and thank you for engaging with my work. It was challenging at first with all the time-jumps but I definitely emerged from this read with a much deeper appreciation of Vonnegut and his craft. Stay tuned for the wrap-up post, and while you’re at it make sure you vote for our next read, which kicks off next week.