Slaughterhouse-Five Chapter 7 - 8
A quarter of a century post his Dresden ordeal, Billy finds himself on a chartered flight to Montreal with 28 fellow optometrists, including his father-in-law. As Valencia bids farewell from the tarmac, munching on a candy bar, we learn from the narrator that the Tralfamadorians perceive her and her father, like all living beings, as mere machines. Billy is aware of the impending plane crash. The passengers are entertained by a barbershop quartet of optometrists, the Four-eyed Bastards, whose Polish song about coal miners triggers Billy’s memory of a public execution in Dresden.
Billy slips into a doze, drifting back to 1944 when Roland Weary was shaking him awake. The plane crashes into Vermont’s Sugarbush Mountain, leaving Billy as the sole survivor with a fractured skull. Austrian ski instructors, donned in black ski masks, rescue him. Billy, in his delirium, mutters “Schlachthof-fünf”, the address of his Dresden prison. Post-surgery, Billy’s recovery is filled with dreams, some involving time travel. Billy’s time travel takes him back to Dresden, to his first night at the slaughterhouse where he, Edgar Derby, and Werner Gluck accidentally stumble upon a shower room filled with naked girls. This marks Billy and Gluck’s first encounter with female nudity. They eventually reach their destination, the prison kitchen, where the cook comments on their pitiful state, declaring, “All the real soldiers are dead.”
Another time trip after his plane accident takes Billy to a malt syrup factory in Dresden. The POWs there, including Billy, secretly consume the syrup intended for pregnant women. Billy’s first taste of the syrup sends shivers of “ravenous gratitude” through his emaciated body. He shares this joy with Edgar Derby, who weeps with happiness upon tasting the syrup.
Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American Nazi propagandist, addresses the exhausted, malnourished prisoners at the slaughterhouse, inviting them to join his Free American Corps. Edgar Derby rises to the occasion, denouncing Campbell and defending the American fight for freedom. An air-raid siren interrupts their confrontation, leading everyone to seek shelter in a meat locker beneath the slaughterhouse. The alarm turns out to be false. Billy’s time travel takes him back to a conversation with his frustrated daughter, Barbara, who blames Kilgore Trout for Billy’s Tralfamadorian beliefs. Billy reminisces about his first meeting with Trout in Ilium, where Trout manages newspaper delivery boys. Billy invites Trout to his eighteenth wedding anniversary celebration, where Trout becomes the center of attention among the optometrists and their wives.
Maggie White, a naive yet appealing woman, is led by Trout to believe that fabricating stories is a divine crime, punishable by incarceration. In his fervor, Trout inadvertently spits a salmon roe into Maggie’s décolletage. The Four-eyed Bastards, a barbershop quartet of optometrists, perform a nostalgic song about enduring friendship, visibly unsettling Billy. Trout surmises that Billy has peered through a “time window”. Overwhelmed by the quartet’s subsequent performance, Billy retreats upstairs, accidentally intruding on his son in the bathroom, strumming a guitar while on the toilet. Lying on his bed, Billy grapples with the profound impact of the Febs on him, his mind drifting back to the night Dresden was obliterated. American prisoners and four guards weathered the bombing in a meat locker, emerging to a Dresden transformed into a smoldering mineral deposit. The guards’ shifting expressions of awe and terror, their mouths agape in silence, evoke in Billy the image of a mute barbershop quartet. Billy’s temporal journey takes him to Tralfamadore, where a pregnant Montana Wildhack requests a story. He recounts the devastation of Dresden, describing the charred logs strewn about that were once people. In the ruins of Dresden, the guards and prisoners scour the lunar-like landscape for sustenance, encountering no other living beings within the city. As dusk falls, they find refuge in an inn located in a suburb spared from the bombings. The blind innkeeper and his family, aware of Dresden’s destruction, offer the prisoners soup, beer, and a stable for the night. As the prisoners settle in for the night, the innkeeper bids them goodnight in German, “Good night, Americans. Sleep well.”
Analysis
The Tralfamadorian philosophy echoes Einstein’s theory that an object’s true description requires its spatial and temporal coordinates. This concept, simplified, means to locate something, one must know not just where, but also when it exists. As objects evolve over time, their true essence is captured only by a series of snapshots taken throughout their existence.
“Slaughterhouse-Five” extends this idea to humans. Tralfamadorians, with their four-dimensional vision, perceive the entirety of an object or person, unlike humans. Billy’s incessant time-traveling mimics this holistic perception. Particularly in Chapter 7, Billy’s rapid time-traveling episodes during his head injury recovery offer fleeting glimpses of various Billy Pilgrims from different moments. The challenge lies in identifying the ‘real’ Billy, who might just be an amalgamation of these snapshots. Thus, understanding Billy and the novel as coherent entities may be less significant than acknowledging the breadth and importance of their respective journeys.
Vonnegut intriguingly differentiates between genuine time travel and dreams. He suggests that Billy’s erratic time-traveling episodes, which could be perceived as insanity, might be dreams reflecting his real life. Time travel could be a term for dreams about real-life events, emphasizing their potency. If we follow this interpretation, most of “Slaughterhouse-Five” could be considered a grand dream in Billy’s mind. However, Billy’s ability to drift into dreams in various situations might suggest a sleep disorder. Throughout the novel, few dreams do not qualify as time travel, such as Billy dreaming of being a giraffe or daydreaming about performing tricks for a crowd. Billy’s realization of his concealed trauma history marks a pivotal point in the novel. Despite Vonnegut’s departure from traditional narrative devices in “Slaughterhouse-Five”, this moment of self-awareness is crucial in Billy’s character development, setting the stage for his decision to propagate the Tralfamadorian gospel on earth.
