Saturday, September 19, 2009

Plane Crash

In chapter 7, Billy gets onto a chartered airplane with his crude father-in-law, who enjoys disgusting songs from the war. Somehow, Billy knows that the plane will crash, and that he and the copilot will be the only survivors. I think that he is still looking into the past, and his knowledge of what he knew then has been confused.
Before the plane crashes, Billy timetravels into 1944, and Roland Weary is shaking him, trying to get him to keep going. Does this have a double meaning? Maybe, since he is about to have a near-death experience, his memory goes back to his other near-death experience, when he almost froze to death.
After the plane crashes he is rescued by two Germans. Having suffered a a fracture to the skull, he was slightly dishelved, and didn't know where he was. Thinking that he was still in World War Two, he whispered his address to the German, "Schlachthof-funf" (199). It is interesting that his rescuers just so happened to be German, and that he said his World War II address in their language. Is this an important fact? Or mere information?
After being brought down Sugarbush Mountain on a toboggan, he was taken to a hospital. The author specifies that he went to a hospital that was private, and was operated on by a famous brain surgeon. I think that he specified that the surgeon was famous, and the hospital was private, to make it seem that he was completely normal afterwards, and there was no possibility of him having any brain damage at all.

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