Slaughterhouse-Five: Discussion II
Chapter 4: A bug trapped in amber
Initial thoughts
In these chapters things get weirder, and sadder. Billy is unwell. It was apparent early on but the scope of his disconnection from reality is revealed even more starkly in these pages. I think its best to view his encounter with the Tralfamadorians through the lens of dissociation—the hallucinations of a person unable to come to grips with the horrors he witnessed. That’s the frame through which we should examine these couple of chapters, rather than the frame of science fiction.
Chapter 4
I’m curious about the pairs of colors that appear repeatedly in these first few pages. The wedding tent, orange and black, are juxtaposed clearly with the color of Billy’s hands, which are ivory and blue. We later learn that Billy’s hands were the color of ivory and blue on the the railcar as he was transported to prison. It’s one of many details that link together his memories, like dogs barking and taking a leak. (72)
I was struck by Billy and his wife in the bed (the first of many scenes this chapter in a bed), with Billy thinking about how she no longer had ovaries or a uterus, a sad and uncomfortable revelation. That her surgeon was none other than one of Billy’s Partner in the new Holiday Inn is another twisted mix of the tragic with the banal that Vonnegut so excels in, that highlights the absurdity of life itself. A man using money made removing a woman’s ovaries to invest in hotels that provide all-American families with comfort and memories is an interesting take on the American Dream, to say the least.
Billy knows he’s about to be kidnapped on the night of his daughter’s wedding. I wonder if this means he knows when he’s about to have a mental break, or is just another indicator of his jumbled memory
The empty, moonlight bedrooms of Billy’s two children is an evocative image, one marking the steady march of time. Billy’s children are “children no more. They were gone forever.” Youth and innocence are casualties of not just war but time. The permanence of Billy’s daughter’s passage into adulthood is profound to Billy—and here we feel for him as a father more than anything else.
“Billy was guided by dread and the lack of dread.” This is another example of Billy inhabiting two different states at the same time. (73)
Mustard gas and roses—not sure if I traced this the first time when it was first linked to the man the author talks to on the phone. The combination of a chemical agent with the symbol of love is pointed, suggesting a clash of two irreconcilable concepts—chemical warfare and love
Soft drink with no nourishment — another critique of capitalism? Steinbeck was basically like rich get too rich and we get the guns while Vonnegut’s seems to be more a a critique of us as consumers, more about the emptiness of it all
“He had an hour to kill before the saucer came.” Perfect.
I wonder if the war film that “played backward” was the trigger for Billy’s abduction
The playing of the film backward is a clever device. It doesn’t just play into the idea of time not being sequential. It also plays into an image of good will and even ends with what could be viewed as a symbolic assertion of peace. American bombs that remove the bombs from German cities instead of dropping them, German planes that suck the bullets from American fighters. It’s the turning back of time, the changing of the past, and it’s only possible with a remote
That the reversed film ends not just with the planes landing again but with an image of disarmament, of sending the bombs home and away from Europe—almost seems to be an indictment not just of war but also nuclear proliferation (74)
American fliers turning back into high school kids—not just the turning back of time but the giving back of youth and innocence
“It became imperative that he took hold of the bottom rung of the ladder.” I like this image that of a ship taking men off to war. The use of “imperative” has connotations of duty and order and inevitability. The imperative that had a generation of men climbed up onto a transport ship that would take them across the Atlantic to fight a war
Why me? Another central question in the novel. He’s asking this of the Tralfamadorians, who could also be examined as godlike figures. It’s an old, existential question
Billy is linked to the paperweight on his desk with ladybugs in it, “trapped in the amber of this moment” like the bugs, according to the Tralfamadorians. Is Billy trapped in amber, too? Is it futile to question why is living the life he lives, with all its senselessness? The Tralfamadorians seem to think so.
I’m wondering if the hobo’s commentary to Billy about how it could be worse is a sort of meta-commentary upon Vonnegut’s story itself, one intended to reflect the many WWII victims who suffered far crueler fates than him. But that’s the point, it’s all relative. Billy’s mental illness is just as severe.
That Billy is lashing out in his sleep to the point where nobody wants to sleep near him suggests that he was already breaking during the train ride. That he sleeps standing up or doesn’t sleep at all in the car could be one of the early sources of his trauma. It’s also interesting to think about considering the amount of scenes that take place in beds (79)
Roland Weary dies—just not the hero’s death he imagined. He dies of gangrene in his feet, another casualty of the war, not from a glamorous bullet but from a bully who took his shoes, linked to a the schoolyard to the bitter end, waxing poetic about the Three Musketeers and sending messages to his family. Like a child, too, he wants revenge, and blames Billy Pilgrim for his death.
Billy gets a civilian coat instead of his soldiers. He survives the bombing of Dresden which killed civilians. He is not warlike. He does not even carry a weapon. He is always linked to a civilian because he is one, at least in spirit.
The prisoners are forced to take off their clothes, just like Billy is in Tralfamadore. Prisoners of war of course were not the only ones to be deloused in showers, either. Victims of the Holocaust received the same treatment, not to mention a second, crueler form, the evil that looms over the text but is not outright stated. This image nakedness speaks to the dehumanization of man, the turning of into cattle which wind up in the slaughterhouse
I think Billy’s display in the zoo on Tralfamadore can be directly linked with his experience here in the prison, where he is mocked for his weak appearance, and treated as a specimen. This contrasts directly the perception of him on Tralfamadore where he’s actually considered quite sexy
Edgar Derby. He’s the one who we know steals a teapot and is executed, a different kind of victim than Billy Pilgrim and the civilians but a victim nonetheless. He’s a teacher, like Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan, and he’s also described as old but also a DILF. I feel like I trust him. He is so old that his son is fighting in the Pacific— another indictment about how war relies on the relentless churning of youth into canon fodder. Imagine if instead of having a son screwing off in college he was fighting in Iwo Jima instead. And you were fighting in France. And imagine being the mother and wife left behind while this was happening and just like, doing dishes, while this is all happening. Bet that underage drinking citation doesn’t seem so scary now. Just a totally different planet that Vonnegut is touching upon here from today, and it was the reality that once existed. Derby is old, for war. It’s the Children’s Crusade, after all.
I like the contrast of Derby, one of the best bodies, with Lazzaro, one of the worst. Lazzaro is small and nasty with scars and boils. He heard Weary in the box car and decides to do his bidding. This sets him up as a direct antagonist to Billy, so I wonder if that means Derby will be a friend (84)
The cooing of the German captors is linked also with infancy, with motherhood. One of the biggest tropes in war films is the fatally wounded soldier screaming for his mother. Does he scream because he is still a kid, or because he longs to be one?
The chapter ends with the revelation that to the Tralfamadorians only know the concept of free will to exist on Earth. If we view the aliens and their knowledge as manifestations of Billy’s consciousness, then what does this mean? Billy seems to embody the opposite of free will, instead simply being a cog in the machinery of history. But is this the truth?
The discussion on chapter 5 continues here.