Fire Rains From the Sky (SF Chapter 8)

This chapter begins with the American traitor Howard W. Campbell, who is trying to get the Americans to fight for Germany. He is dressed ridiculously and speaks ridiculously to a group of tired starved men who don't care for a word he says. Derby stands up to him, and the author says thta this is one of the few or only moments in the book when something so theatrical happens, because generally everyone was tired and listless. Eventually they are interrupted by an air-raid siren and they hide in a meat locker. It is the night before the bombing, during which they'll hide in the meat locker, while their guars die because they'd gone home. The book returns to Billy arguing with Barbara who mentions Kilgore Trout, who has become a friend of Billy's. He is prolific, but unsuccessful and also bitter. However his books are very wise as to human nature, its greed and cruelty and superficial distinctions. He also does not consider himself a writer because the world never acknowledged him as such. This chapter also uses the sentence "Somewhere a big dog barked." (168) I know the book has used it more than once before this, but the only time I can clearly remember is when Roland Weary and Billy are captured by Germans. The only other fan to contact Kilgore was Billy's friend from the veterans hospital who complained about Kilgore's prose, who in turn complained about Rosewater's prose.

On page 173, Billy is once again a spectator to his own life. He thinks his life is no mystery to him, as he has always known all of it, but he soon finds himself unknowlingly affected by some "secret" about himself. The secret is, of course, that he is lonely. He has never had true friends, or been truly in love, or truly felt connected to anyone. Trout draws him because he has the potential to understand Billy and his peculiar life experience.

The firebombing makes Dresden llok like one big flame, and the smoke blots out the sun. It is so vicious that "Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead." (178) The guards resemble the barbershop quartet that will later make Billy feel terribly sad without knowing why. Montana is the only person Billy has ever connected to, as he seems to really like her, and he tells her about the war without her asking for it specifically, something he denied to his wife when he did. Dresden and its bodies were so foreign, so unreal, they looked like the moon. The destruction was to be so total, that planes later circled to kill anyone moving, because as the book says it would be a flaw in the design "there were to be no moon men at all" (180)