So Long Forever

            “The guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though their moths were often open. They looked like a silent film of a barbershop quartet.

‘So long forever,’ they might have been singing, ‘old fellows and pals; So long forever, old sweethearts and pals—God bless ‘em—” (227)

The night of the bombing, Billy was hiding down in the underground meat locker with the other American prisoners of war. There were only four guards with them—only four guards that would be surviving the night.

Billy watches the guards as they, along with everyone else, wait in terror for the bombs to finish falling. The guards are at a loss of words, which is what ends up reminding Billy of the silent movie of a barbershop quartet; this illustrates the author’s initial warning from chapter one that there isn’t anything intelligent to say about a massacre.

This moment is preceded with a build up of different scenes of Billy and Valencia’s anniversary party, where Billy is overcome with uncontrollable tears when the barbershop quartet sings. In the moment he can’t understand why he’s so affected by the performance, but eventually he is able to look back and see that in his memory the destruction of Dresden is denoted by this image of a barbershop quartet silent film. Seeing four men with their mouths open reminds him too clearly of the four guards that night of the bombing that his emotions finally reveal his grief over the death and destruction of the war.

The awkwardness of the guards seems childish in the way that they roll their eyes and experiment in trying to find the right facial expression for such a moment. They don’t know the words to say, the feelings to express, and in their ignorance they find the innocence and vulnerability that comes with war during times of mass and imminent death. This again references the subtitle of this novel, The Children’s Crusade. Vonnegut portrays this moment through not the use of words that incite emotions of danger and fear but through a comparison to a barbershop quartet singing “So long forever” in a silent film; he thus creates the perfect atmosphere for a truer understanding of what war does to men.

Q: This is one of the few times that Billy is presenting a memory purely as a memory rather than a time-traveled experience. What is the significance of this specific event being remembered “shimmeringly” rather than just another time jump?