There happens to be a radio station near Billy’s
hotel. Claiming to be a writer from the Ilium Gazette, Billy
gets on a talk-show panel of literary critics discussing the state
of the novel. Billy waits his turn, then speaks about Tralfamadore
and Montana Wildhack and the nature of time. He is escorted to the
street and makes his way back to his hotel. There he falls asleep
and time-travels back to Tralfamadore, where Montana is breast-feeding
their child. She says that she can tell that Billy has been time-traveling.
A silver locket hanging between her bare breasts bears the same
inscription—the Serenity Prayer—as the plaque in Billy’s optometry
office.
Analysis
Vonnegut throws the tragic absurdity of human life into
sharp relief in his description of Billy’s happiest moment. The
day after the German surrender, Billy dozes blissfully in the sun
amid Dresden’s ruins, but he is lying in a tomb on wheels. The coffin-shaped
wagon points to a symbolic death suffered even by the survivors
of war. It is the death of a meaningful existence, the death of
innocence for all the “babies” who carry out the latest Children’s
Crusade. Billy has not yet grasped the emptiness of victory. Yet
when two Germans point out the miserable state of the horses hitched
to Billy’s coffin, he cannot avoid the fact that his victory also
contains his own defeat. The happiest moment in Billy’s life ends
in tears for the plight of two beleaguered beasts of burden.
Billy’s interaction with the historian in the Vermont
hospital shows how history and fiction are to some degree interchangeable
in Slaughterhouse-Five. Although Billy’s stories
of time travel and alien abduction are clearly spurious, it is still
possible that he has been a soldier in World War II. But when the
official author of Dresden’s history of destruction dismisses Billy’s
claim of having witnessed it, it becomes clear that our conception
of history is shaped by the people who are in charge of writing
about it. The world knows little about the massive and grisly loss
of civilian life at Dresden, and it is partly up to Rumfoord to
keep it that way. He would rather not hear what he fears Billy might
have to say about the events. Slaughterhouse-Five is
Vonnegut’s offensive against the collective amnesia propagated by
people like Rumfoord.
The things Billy sees when he visits the bookstore in
Times Square further confuse our understanding of reality within
the novel’s fictional framework. Books by Kilgore Trout are displayed mysteriously
in the store’s window, making us wonder whether or not it is a coincidence
that Billy looks at the Trout book about aliens abducting a man
and a woman right before he tells a nighttime radio audience about
an experience of his own similar to what Trout’s book describes.
When Billy brings the book to the front of the store, the clerks
react with bewilderment—they do not even know that they carry Trout
novels. The books take on a fantastical aura; it seems possible
that they have been placed by an alien hand for Billy’s eyes only,
to open him up to a new consciousness. Or, perhaps, Vonnegut is
removing the credibility with which Billy’s story begins. We see
similar stories of alien abduction in other Trout novels within Slaughterhouse-Five, and
Billy also sees pornographic movies starring Montana Wildhack that
portray her as a captive in an alien zoo. These late mentions of
such material suggest that Billy’s life with Montana in the Tralfamadorian
zoo might not be a lucid memory or an instance of time travel but
rather a delusion that incorporates elements that Billy has encountered
in fictional works.
