Loophole in Slaughterhouse-Five

I think I may have found a possible loophole in Slaughterhouse-Five. But first, I should clarify some assumptions that I have, to see if my understanding of the book is correct.
_________________________________________________________________________________

1). We can use the book metaphor with Billy Pilgrim's unstuckness: We view his life like we flip through a book, seeing different parts of his life whenever we want, because he is living his entire life simultaneously. Vonnegut is just giving us snippets of the book that is Billy's life to make Slaughterhouse-Five, but Billy is living his entire life simultaneously.

2). There is no "present-day Billy", because he is unstuck and has no intermediate, baseground from which he can leap forward and backward in time. He belongs to every part of his life equally.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Then, how can Billy be aware of the bombing of Dresden, thirty days before the actual bombing, while walking in the parade in Dresden? (this is page 192 of my version, but it is the fat version. The actual number should be closer to 180 I think. It starts "Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to smithereens and then burned--in about thirty more days...)

Using the book metaphor, how can a character know what is going to happen to him in the future? Characters in books just live through the plot like a normal person in linear-time life would. With Billy's unstuckness, he just lives each part simultaneously. He jumps from page to page in the book that is his life, but lives them normally.

Transitioning to the second assumption that I made. If it is true, then there is no Billy that knows of the bombing beforehand. With the book metaphor, there is no character reading the book outside of the plot; there is only a character in the plot. He is living that parade in the streets of Dresden just like it was the first time. In fact,just saying that Billy learned of the bombing suggests linear time (and for Billy, there is no such thing as linear time), that there was a point in time that he didn't know of this bombing, then a later point in time that he learned of the bombing, when in Billy's unstuck life, there is no before and after.

Main point: Billy doesn't know what is going to happen to him, he's living the moment like it's structured, just like it's the first time.

This paragraph confused me (actually there's also the part where Billy' knows that the aliens are coming for him). If my assumptions are incorrect or I'm missing something, please let me know!

When the helmets come off

In Slaughterhouse-Five, at the beginning of Chapter 3, Vonnegut completely un-glamorizes the German soldiers and their police dog. He strips off their intimidating appearances by giving the soldiers and dog a background. The effect reminded me of the scenes in war movies, where the American soldier tumbles into hand-to-hand combat with an enemy soldier.

The American soldier is clearly the protagonist of the movie. We get his background, see him with his squad mates, see his hopes and fears. In a battle he fires from a distance at the German soldiers who are clearly the antagonists of the movie. They look intimidating without faces in the background, running behind panzers, and their helmets are the only visible part of their head.

But when the American soldier runs into a German soldier and they start rolling around on the ground and their helmets come off, you see that the German soldier looks just like the American soldier; they both have fear in their eyes, and are both struggling for their own lives just to live to see the next day.

 

 I think Saving Private Ryan does a good job of un-glamorizing war (What Mary O'Hare fears that Vonnegut will do) by making each killing scene more personal, and making the German soldiers more human. The beginning of Chapter 3 does the same thing; shows us that the German soldiers are young and old, are farmers, and have a female dog, which is quite relatable to the American soldiers and to the readers. By drawing similarities between the enemy soldiers and the American soldiers, both Saving Private Ryan and Slaughterhouse-Five un-glamorize war.

The photos are almost the same!

The author of my panel presentation article, Sharon A. Jessee, wrote in her article "Laughter and Identity in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo" that Reed often uses the pictures in the novel for contradiction and irony, which draws attention to a point he's trying to make (I didn't pay much attention to the pictures in Mumbo Jumbo after I learned that they mostly don't make sense):

In the epilogue on page 210, Papa LaBas is talking about Freud and says:

"I once leafed through a photo book about the West. I was struck by how the Whites figured in the center of the photos and drawings while Blacks were centrifugally distant. The center was usually violent: gunfighting lynching murdering torturing. The Blacks were, usually, if it were an interior, standing in the doorway. Digging the center." (p. 210).

With Jessee's article in mind, I noticed that the photos sort of contradicted these observations by LaBas. The page is set up with two photos stacked on top of eachother, like this:

The quote from the same page says that whites are mostly in the center of the photos while blacks are pushed into the centrifugally into the distance. In terms of the 3D space of the pictures, the blacks are distant, in the background, away from the action happening in the foreground. However, in a 2D sense of the picture, the two black men in the two photos are both in the very center, and in almost the exact same position in both photos; leaning to the left, head slightly tilted.

This also goes with the general theme of the book, where the high and low speech styles are switched between black and white characters; in the photos, the racial stereotypes that are portrayed are the exact opposite stereotypes. Blacks are stereotyped as rough while whites are stereotyped as high-class, but these photos reverse that notion. And what Jessee's article says is that this draws attention to those stereotypes.