Slaughterhouse-Five: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

The chapter begins with the story of Valencia’s death. After hearing that Billy was in a plane crash in Vermont, Valencia drives the family Cadillac and, because she is distraught, makes an incorrect turn, slows down, and is hit by a Mercedes, damaging the car’s exhaust system. Valencia continues driving despite the accident and pull into the hospital parking lot, only to pass out, blue in the face, and die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Meanwhile, Billy is in a hospital room in Vermont with a Harvard professor named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, who has broken a leg skiing. Rumfoord's fifth wife, Lily, who is twenty-three (Rumfoord is 70), brings him books to read. Lily is scared of Billy, who talks in his sleep, and Rumfoord finds him boring. Rumfoord is the official Air Force Historian and a retired brigadier general.

Lily has brought Rumfoord a Xerox of President Truman’s speech to the Japanese shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima—this is for Rumfoord’s research. Lily reads the document, which describes the atomic bomb, a brief history of its development, and the military and moral justification for its use in war. Lily has also brought a book called The Destruction of Dresden. One foreword to the book calls the bombing of that city a military necessity, and another claims that advocates of nuclear disarmament must take bombings like Dresden into account, conducted as they were with conventional weapons. Billy continues to mumble in his sleep.

Barbara, having just learned that her mother is dead and her father gravely wounded, visits Billy, who is time-traveling: to 1958, prescribing lenses; to age 16, in a doctor's waiting room with a man afflicted by awful gas. Billy briefly sees his son in Vermont and misses his wife’s funeral. Rumfoord tells Lily that he needs information about Dresden for his new one-volume history of the air war in World War II—none was included in previous multi-volume editions. Billy speaks, finally, saying: “I was there.”

Rumfoord believes Billy is merely repeating what Rumfoord had been saying earlier; he does not believe Billy was in Dresden. Rumfoord believes Billy is weak, and that “weak people deserve to die.” Billy comes unstuck and is back outside Dresden, two days after the end of the war in Europe, May 1945. He and other Americans are in a wagon pulled by horses. They are using the wagon to collect material amid the rubble of the city. Sitting in the back of the wagon, dozing under the sun, becomes one of Billy’s happiest memories. A German couple speaks softly to the horses, which have been ill-treated by their American drivers, and curse Billy for this. When Billy looks at the broken-down horses, he cries.

Vonnegut explains that the book’s epigraph, from a Christmas carol, describes Billy’s silent crying in later life: “The cattle are lowing / The Baby awakes. / But the little Lord Jesus / No crying He makes.” Billy is back in Vermont, telling the story of the horses to Rumfoord. Rumfoord argues that Dresden was militarily necessary. Billy said it was all right, that “everything is all right,” and that he learned this from the Tralfamadorians.

Barbara takes Billy home, where a nurse can take care of him, but Billy sneaks off to a hotel in New York. He is looking for a news program on which he can speak about his experiences with the Tralfamadorians. Billy goes into an adult bookstore because he sees four Trout novels in the front window. He reads the beginning of a book called The Big Board, about a man and woman captured by aliens and put in a zoo on Zircon-212.

He realizes he read this book in the veterans’ hospital after the war. The plot of the book is as follows: On the “big board” in the human zoo is information about the humans’ “investments,” which have been simulated by the aliens. The humans are instructed to make as much money as they can while the aliens observe their behavior. In another of the Trout novels, a man builds a time machine and travels back to meet a twelve-year-old Jesus. Jesus was instructed by Roman soldiers to build a device for killing a “rabble-rouser.”

A clerk comes up to Billy and tells him that adult materials are in the back of the shop. Billy continues reading the Trout book about Jesus and the time-machine; at the end, Jesus is killed, and the man checks Jesus’ pulse, determining that he has in fact died on the cross. When Jesus is taken off the cross the man measures him; he is five feet, three and one-half inches tall. At checkout, buying the book about Jesus, he sees a magazine asking, “What really became of Montana Wildhack?”

Billy knows what actually happened to Montana: she was on Tralfamadore with him. He walks to the back and looks into a picture-machine showing Montana eating a banana. Then another clerk shows him a suggestive picture of a woman and a pony.

Billy finds his way into a radio show in progress, its topic: the future of the novel. Billy gets into the show by saying he is a literary critic for the Ilium Gazette. Various critics offer their opinions of novels, mostly agreeing that they aren’t very socially useful. Billy is then called on, and he tells of his experiences on Tralfamadore. He is asked to leave at the commercial break.

Billy is back on Tralfamadore with Montana, who says she knows he has been time-traveling. She also knows that he was a “clown” in the war and that Derby was shot. Montana is nursing her and Billy’s child, and between her bare breasts is a silver locket, on which is engraved: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . . .”