But when a nurse hired to care for him is not looking, he sneaks out and drives to New York City, where he hopes to make an appearance on television and tell the world about the lessons he learned on Tralfamadore. After checking into a hotel, he walks to Times Square and discovers a bookstore: In the back of the store, adults watch pornographic movies for 25 cents. Surrounded by hundreds of cheap books of pornography, he discovers four paperbacks by Kilgore Trout and buys one. He is unable to get a guest appearance on television, but he is booked for a radio talk show.
A group of literary critics have gathered to discuss the purpose of writing novels; however, when Billy gets his turn, he speaks about flying saucers and Montana Wildhack. During the next commercial, he is gently expelled from the studio. Billy returns to his hotel room, where he falls asleep and travels to Tralfamadore. When Montana asks him where he has been, he relates the events of his visit to New York City. He tells her that he bought one of Trout's books and saw part of a pornographic movie that she made.
Montana's response shows that she has adopted Tralfamadorian philosophy: She feels free from guilt for having been a porn star. Vonnegut continues many of the same themes established in previous chapters, namely the color imagery and the biblical allusions.
Overcome by carbon monoxide caused by the car accident, Valencia turns a "heavenly azure" as she dies. The azure of her death recalls the many references to blue and ivory, which denote stasis and death. The biblical allusion occurs when Billy dozes in the wagon and becomes aware of voices speaking in hushed tones.
He imagines that the voices he hears are similar to the voices of those who removed Christ's body from the cross. Similar to the infant Jesus in the novel's epigraph, Billy is once again cast in the role of a Christ-figure.
Aware of the horses' suffering, he bursts into tears. Later in life, he will weep uncontrollably in private. Remembering that Rumfoord is the official U. Air Force Historian, and that he is attempting to condense a volume history of the air force into one volume, Vonnegut suggests that an "official response" to the bombing of Dresden, and, by association, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, is ludicrous.
The personal stories of the havoc caused by war, of which Billy's is just one example, are dismissed by those in charge.
That the Dresden bombing was unfortunate is minimized by Rumfoord's assertion that it had to be done. Given the picture that Vonnegut presents of Dresden being a charming city without war factories or military installations, we conclude that Dresden did not need to be destroyed, that it offered no threat to the Allies, and that it was therefore mindlessly destroyed.
Throughout the novel, events separated by chronological time arc often closely linked psychologically. One of the most poignant examples of this pairing concerns the elderly man in the waiting room with Billy when Billy is sixteen years old, and the hobo in previous chapters, who dies en route to the first camp that Billy and his fellow prisoners are taken.
The elderly man in the waiting room apologizes profusely for his flatulence, telling Billy that he knew growing old would be bad, but he did not think that aging would be as bad as it really is. We are reminded of the hobo, who continually states that being taken prisoner and forced into a boxcar by Nazis is not as bad as it might seem. The hobo's repetitive assertion, that he has been in worse situations than the one he now finds himself in, ironically ceases when he dies on the ninth day of the journey.
The general tone evoked by these two events contrasts Billy's clownish profile and makes the novel much more emotionally complex than we might at first believe it to be. The cattle are lowing, The Baby awakes. But the little Lord Jesus No crying He makes. These four lines appear in one of the most famous Christmas carols ever, "Away in a Manger. Thanks, Kurt! In Chapter 9, Section 20 , the narrator comments that main character, Billy Pilgrim, always cries silently when he weeps after the war.
He weeps very little, even though he has "seen a lot of things to cry about " 9. In other words, like the baby Jesus, "no crying he makes. And he'll also include the reasons why he does so The Tralfamadorians think that time does not go forward; instead, all points in time exist simultaneously.
Nothing happens before or after anything else, so we cannot change anything and we never die. Sure, there are moments when we are dead or unborn, but those moments exist alongside our own living experiences.
Billy feels that this should comfort us Earthlings who are afraid of death. We get lots of indications that this is not meant to be a straight sci-fi kind of story and that Billy's account of his own experiences is unreliable.
He only starts telling everyone about his experiences on Tralfamadore after he breaks his head open in a plane accident in Billy's story of abduction appears to be strongly influenced by other events in the novel, so much so that it could be happening entirely inside his head rather than as part of the "real" world of the novel.
For instance, his story of his life in a zoo on Tralfamadore seems to mimic the plot of a Kilgore Trout novel he reads in Chapter 9, Section He watches a porn flick featuring the woman he claims to have been placed in captivity with, Montana Wildhack, in Chapter 9, Section And the prayer engraved on Montana Wildhack's locket appears framed on the wall of Billy's real-life optometry office.
Check out our "Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory" section for more on the significance of Montana's locket. Yet even if Billy's ideas about Tralfamadore are imagined, they do point to something both he and the narrator desperately crave after the suffering they have experienced. Billy comments, and the narrator agrees, that he wants the following written on his tombstone: "Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt" 5. Only in the Tralfamadorian world can one cherry-pick the good moments from life to relive endlessly.
The truth of the matter is that most human lives involve suffering. As a witness to terrible violence, Billy Pilgrim struggles more than most to find a way to explain how life can be so unfair and meaningless. Billy's trauma over the war is so severe that he has to leave Earth either in his mind or for real to find comfort after all the violence he has seen. In the end, what matters more than the reality or unreality of Billy's life on Tralfamadore after all, he's a fictional character, so the whole question is kind of moot is his desperate longing for new ways to explain human suffering.
The old models of religion and patriotism don't seem to solve anything for him. For more on this subject, check out the "Fate and Free Will" theme.
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