Summary
Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the American Nazi
propagandist, speaks to the weary, malnourished prisoners at the
slaughterhouse. He solicits them to join his Free American Corps
to fight on the Russian front, promising food and repatriation after
the war. Edgar Derby stands up and, in his finest moment, denounces Campbell.
He defends the American fight for freedom and praises the brotherhood
between Russians and Americans. An air-raid
siren concludes the confrontation, and everyone takes shelter in
a meat locker carved into the bedrock beneath the slaughterhouse.
The alarm is false. The narrator states that Dresden will not be
destroyed until the next night.
Billy dozes off in the meat locker and travels back to
a conversation with his exasperated daughter, Barbara. She blames
Kilgore Trout for Billy’s Tralfamadorian pronouncements. Billy recalls
the first time he mets Trout in his own hometown of Ilium. Trout
manages newspaper delivery boys for the Ilium Gazette. He
is shocked that Billy has read his books. Billy invites Trout to
his eighteenth wedding anniversary celebration, where Trout is a
hit with the optometrists and their wives. One of them, the credulous
and attractive Maggie White, listens with concern as Trout leads
her to believe that publishing made-up stories qualifies as a fraud
punishable by God and worthy of jail time. In his enthusiasm, Trout
accidentally spits a piece of salmon roe into Maggie’s cleavage.
The Four-eyed Bastards (or Febs), the barbershop quartet
made up of optometrists, sing a sentimental song about old friendship. The
experience of watching and listening to them visibly shakes Billy.
Trout guesses that Billy has looked through a “time window.” When
the barbershop quartet sings again, Billy has to leave the room.
He goes upstairs, where he accidentally walks in on his son in the
bathroom holding a guitar as he sits on the toilet. Billy lies down on
his bed, trying to figure out why the Febs have such an effect on him.
He remembers the night Dresden was destroyed. The American prisoners
and four guards waited out the bombing in the meat locker. They
emerged to find Dresden replaced by one big, smoking mineral deposit.
The four guards huddled together, and the changing expressions on
their faces—silent mouths open in awe and terror—seem to Billy like
a silent film of a barbershop quartet.
Billy time-travels to Tralfamadore, where Montana Wildhack, who
is six months pregnant, asks him to tell her a story. He tells her of
the destruction of Dresden and of the little burned logs lying all around
that were actually people. In bombed-out Dresden, the guards and
the prisoners venture out onto the moonscape to forage for food
and water. In the city itself they do not encounter another living
soul. At nightfall, they reach an inn in a portion of a suburb untouched
by bombs or flames. The blind innkeeper and his family know that
Dresden has been destroyed. They give the prisoners soup and beer
and a stable to sleep in for the night. As the prisoners prepare
for bed, the innkeeper says in German, “Good night, Americans. Sleep
well.”
Analysis
Billy’s realization that he is hiding his secret history
of trauma from himself marks an important point in the novel. Despite
the fact that Vonnegut has dispensed with most traditional narrative
devices in Slaughterhouse-Five, the focusing of
Billy’s self-awareness constitutes a crucial moment in the development
of Billy’s character. It paves the way for his eventual decision
to spread the Tralfamadorian gospel on earth. Ironically, instead
of sitting back and accepting human ignorance of the true nature
of time, Billy exerts his will to help his fellow inhabitants of
earth.
Billy’s recognition of the effect of the Febs on his
psyche demonstrates a great deal of self-awareness. Although he
undergoes emotional stress in this section, his response is not
to travel in time, as it has been in other chapters. The fact that
he stays rooted in the present suggests that this moment is one
of Billy’s sanest, even though he is suffering from tremendous emotional
anguish. When Trout asks Billy if he has seen the past or the future
through a “time window,” Billy answers no. Valencia hits closer
to the mark when she says, “You looked as though you’d seen a ghost.”
The sight of the Febs with their mouths open in song raises the
specter of a tragic memory. As Billy retires to his room to attempt
to sort out the cause of his distress, he remembers (without time-tripping,
as the narrator takes pains to point out) the horrible sight of
the four German guards, clustered together with their mouths agape.
