emerge at noon the next day into what looks like the surface of the moon.
The guards gape at the destruction. They look like a silent film of a
barbershop quartet.
We move to the Trafalmadorian Zoo. Montana Wildhack asked Billy to tell her
a story. He tells her about the burnt logs, actually corpses. He tells her
about the great monuments and buildings of the city turned into a flat,
lunar surface.
We move to Dresden. Without food or water, the POWs have to march to find
some if they are to survive. They make their way across the treacherous
landscape, much of it still hot, bits of crumbling. They are attacked by
American fighter planes. The end up in the suburbs, at an inn that has
prepared to receive any survivors. The innkeeper lets the Americans sleep
in the stable. He provides them with food and drink, and goes out to bid
them goodnight as they go to bed.
Chapter Nine. Summary:
When Billy is in the hospital in Vermont, Valencia goes crazy with grief.
Driving to the hospital, she gets in a terrible accident. She gears up her
car and continues driving to the hospital, determined to get there even
though she leaves her exhaust system behind. She pulls into the hospital
driveway and falls unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning. An hour
later, she is dead.
Billy is oblivious, unconscious in his bed, dreaming and time traveling. In
the bed next to him is Bertram Copeland Ruumford, an arrogant retired
Brigadier General in the Air Force Reserve. He is a seventy-year-old
Harvard professor and the official historian of the Air Force, and he is in
superb physical condition. He has a twenty-three year-old high school
dropout with an IQ of 103. He is an arrogant jingoist. Currently he is
working on a history of the Air Corp in World War II. He has to write a
section on the success of the Dresden bombing. Ruumfoord's wife Lily is
scared of Billy, who mumbles deliriously. Ruumfoord is disgusted by him,
because all he does in his sleep in quit or surrender.
Barbara comes to visit Billy. She is in a horrible state, drugged up so she
can function after the recent tragedies. Billy cannot hear her. He is
remembering an eye exam he gave to a retarded boy a decade ago. Then he
leaps in time when he was sixteen years old. In the waiting room of a
doctor's office, he sees an old man troubled by horrible gas. Billy opens
his eyes and he is back in the hospital in Vermont. His son Robert, a
decorated Green Beret, is there. Billy closes his eyes again.
He misses Valencia's funeral because he is till too sick. People assume
that he is a vegetable, but actually he is thinking actively about
Trafalmadorians and the lectures he will deliver about time and the
permanence of moments. Overhearing Ruumford talk about Dresden, Billy
finally speaks up and tells Ruumford that he was at Dresden. Ruumford
ignores him, trying to convince himself and the doctors that Billy has
Echonalia, a condition where the sufferer simply repeats what he hears.
Billy leaps in time to May of 1945, two days after the end of the war in
Europe. In a coffin-shaped green wagon, Billy and five other Americans ride
with loot from the suburbs of Dresden. They found the wagon, attached to
two horses, and have been using it to carry things that they have taken.
The homes have been abandoned because the Russians are coming, and the
Americans have been looting. When they go to the slaughterhouse and the
other five Americans loot among the ruins, Billy naps in the wagon. He has
a cavalry pistol and a Luftwaffe ceremonial saber. He wakes; two Germans, a
husband-and-wife pair of obstetricians, are angry about how the Americans
have treated the horses. The horses' hooves are shattered, their mouths are
bleeding from the bits, and they are extremely thirsty. Billy goes around
to look at the horses, and he bursts into tears. It is the only time he
cries in the whole war. Vonnegut reminds the reader of the epigraph at the
start of the book, an excerpt from a Christmas carol that describes the
baby Jesus as not crying. Billy cries very little.
He leaps in time back to the hospital in Vermont, where Ruumford is finally
questioning Billy about Dresden. Barbara takes Billy home later that day.
Billy is watched by a nurse; he is supposed to be under observation, but he
escapes to New York City and gets a hotel room. He plans to tell the world
about the Trafalmadorians and their concept of time. The next day, Billy
goes into a bookstore that sells pornography, peep shows, and Kilgore Trout
novels. Billy is only interested in Kilgore Trout novels. In one of the
pornographic magazines, there is an article about the disappearance of porn
star Montana Wildhack. Later, Billy sneaks onto a radio talk show by posing
as a literary critic. The critics take turns discussing the novel, but when
Billy gets his turn he talks about Trafalmadore. At the next commercial
break, he is made to leave. When he goes back to his hotel room and lies
down, he travels back in time to Trafalmadore. Montana is nursing their
child. She wears a locket with a picture of her mother and the same prayer
that Billy had on his office wall in Ilium.
Chapter Ten. Summary:
Vonnegut tells us that Robert Kennedy died last night. Martin Luther King,
Jr., was assassinated a month ago. Body counts are reported every night on
the news as signs that the war in Vietnam is being won. Vonnegut's father
died years ago of natural causes. He left Billy all of his guns, which
rust. Billy claims that on Trafalmadore the aliens are more interested in
Darwin than Jesus. Darwin, says Vonnegut, taught that death was the means
to progress. Vonnegut recalls the pleasant trip he made to Dresden with his
old war buddy, O'Hare. They were looking up facts about Dresden in a little
book when O'Hare came across a passage on the exploding world population.
By 2000, the book predicts, the world will have a population of 7 billion
people. Vonnegut says that he supposes they will all want dignity.
Billy Pilgrim travels back in time to 1945, two days after the bombing of
Dresden. German authorities find the POWs in the innkeeper's stable. Along
with other POWs, they are brought back to Dresden to dig for bodies. Bodies
are trapped in protected pockets under the rubble, and the POWs are put to
work bringing them up. But after one of the workers is lowered into a
pocket and dies of the dry heaves, the Germans settle on incinerating the
bodies instead of retrieving them. During this time, Edgar Derby is caught
with a teapot he took from the ruins. He is tried and executed by a firing
squad.
Then the POWs were returned to the stable. The German soldiers went off to
fight the Soviets. Spring comes, and one day in May the war is over. Billy
and the other men go outside into the abandoned suburbs. They find a horse-
drawn wagon, the wagon green and shaped like a coffin. The birds sing, "Po-
tee-weet?"
The Sound and the Fury
Summary of April Seventh, 1928:
This section of the book is commonly referred to as "Benjy's section"
because it is narrated by the retarded youngest son of the Compson family,
Benjamin Compson. At this point in the story, Benjy is 33 years old - in
fact, today is his birthday - but the story skips back and forth in time as
various events trigger memories. When the reader first plunges into this
narrative, the jumps in time are difficult to navigate or understand,
although many scenes are marked by recurring images, sounds, or words. In
addition, a sort of chronology can be established depending on who is
Benjy's caretaker: first Versh when Benjy is a child, then T. P. when he is
an adolescent, then Luster when he is an adult. One other fact that may
confuse first-time readers is the repetition of names. There are, for
example, two Jasons (father and son), two Quentins (Benjy's brother and
Caddy's daughter), and two Mauries (Benjy himself before 1900 and Benjy's
uncle). Benjy recalls three important events: the evening of his
grandmother "Damuddy's" death in 1898, his name change in 1900, and Caddy's
sexual promiscuity and wedding in 1910, although these events are
punctuated by other memories, including the delivery of a letter to his
uncle's mistress in 1902 or 1903, Caddy's wearing perfume in 1906, a
sequence of events at the gate of the house in 1910 and 1911 that
culminates in his castration, Quentin's death in 1910, his father's death
and funeral in 1912, and Roskus's death some time after this. I will
summarize each event briefly.
The events of the present day (4/7/28) center around Luster's search for a
quarter he has lost somewhere on the property. He received this quarter
from his grandmother Dilsey in order to go to the circus that evening.
Luster takes Benjy with him as he searches by the golf course that used to
be the Compson's pasture, by the carriage house, down by the branch of the
Yoknapatawpha River, and finally near Benjy's "graveyard" of jimson flowers
in a bottle.
As the story opens, Benjy and Luster are by the golf course, where the
golfers' cries of "caddie" cause Benjy to "beller" because he mistakes
their cries for his missing sister Caddy's name. In the branch, Luster
finds a golfer's ball, which he later tries to sell to the golfers; they
accuse him of stealing it and take it from him. Luster tries to steer Benjy
away from the swing, where Miss Quentin and her "beau" (one of the
musicians from the circus) are sitting, but is unsuccessful. Quentin is
furious and runs into the house, while her friend jokes with Luster and
asks him who visits Quentin. Luster replies that there are too many male
visitors to distinguish.
Luster takes Benjy past the fence, where Benjy sees schoolgirls passing
with their satchels. Benjy moans whenever Luster tries to break from the
routine path Benjy is used to. At Benjy's "graveyard," Luster disturbs the
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