Summary
Nearly twenty-five years after his experience in Dresden,
Billy boards a chartered plane with twenty-eight other optometrists, including
his father-in-law, headed for a trade conference in Montreal. Valencia
waves goodbye from the tarmac while eating a candy bar. The narrator
informs us that, according to the Tralfamadorians, Valencia and
her father, like every other animal and plant, are both machines.
Billy knows that the plane will crash. A barbershop quartet of optometrists
called the Four-eyed Bastards serenades the passengers with bawdy
tunes. One of them is a Polish song about coal miners, which makes
Billy remember a public hanging he witnessed in Dresden in which
a Polish man was lynched for having sex with a German woman.
Billy dozes off and drifts back to a moment in 1944.
Roland Weary is shaking him; Billy tells the Three Musketeers to
go on without him.
The plane crashes into Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont,
and Billy survives with a fractured skull. Austrian ski instructors
wearing black ski masks arrive on the scene. As they check for signs
of life, Billy whispers “Schlachthof-fünf” (“Slaughterhouse-Five”
in German), a phrase he learned in Dresden in order to communicate the
address of his prison if he got lost. The ski instructors transport Billy
down the mountain on a toboggan. A famous neurosurgeon operates
on him, and Billy remains unconscious for two days. The narrator
tells us that Billy’s convalescence is filled with dreams, some
of them involving time travel. He goes back to Dresden and his first
evening at the slaughterhouse, when he, Edgar Derby, and their young
German guard Werner Gluck accidentally open a door onto a shower
room full of beautiful naked girls. This incident marks the first
glimpse of female nudity that Billy and Gluck have ever had. The
three men finally make it to their intended destination, the prison
kitchen. The cook regards their sorry condition and declares, “All
the real soldiers are dead.”
Another Dresden time trip after his plane
accident takes Billy to a factory that manufactures malt syrup.
The POWs work there making the molasses-like
concoction intended to serve as a nutritional supplement for pregnant
women. All the malnourished prisoners who work at the factory secretly
eat the syrup themselves, scooping it out of vats with spoons hidden
in every corner of the building. Billy takes his first spoonful
on his second day at work, and his scrawny body shivers with “ravenous
gratitude.” Billy hands a syrupy spoon through a window to Edgar
Derby, who is working outside. Upon tasting the syrup, Derby bursts into
tears of joy.
Analysis
The philosophy of the Tralfamadorians is reminiscent of
a principle of Einsteinian physics. Einstein argued that an object
is described by four coordinates: the three spatial dimensions and
time. Put simply, in order to know where something is, one must
know when it is. Because objects change over time,
true descriptions of an object require describing it at every moment. The
kinds of descriptions we give are merely snapshots that convey an
object as it appears at a given point in time. The true nature of
the object is expressed only by the totality of snapshots taken
throughout the object’s history and its future.
In effect, Slaughterhouse-Five proposes
that the same thing could be said of a person. The Tralfamadorians,
who see in four dimensions, perceive all of an object and all of
a person, whereas humans do not. But Billy’s rapid, relentless time-tripping
approximates this ability to perceive holistically. This dimensional
quality of perception is particularly present in Chapter 7,
when Billy goes on a series of rapid-fire time trips while recovering
from his head injury. We never see Billy wholly at any one moment,
as Vonnegut does not engage in typical character description. Instead,
we catch brief glimpses of very different Billy Pilgrims from very
different moments. We try to grasp the sum of all the different
Billy Pilgrims from all the different moments through quick, alternating
glimpses of his past, present, and future. But one dilemma that
surfaces in attempting to discern which Billy is the real Billy
is the possibility that perhaps he is just a summation of all his
different snapshots. Billy’s value as a character, then, might be
in sync with the value of Slaughterhouse-Five as
a whole: it is less important to try to understand Billy and the
novel as coherent entities than to recognize the scope and significance
of their respective journeys.
