52 pages • 1 hour read
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.The Sirens of Titan
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: "A Deserter In Time of War"
Content Warning: this section of the guide includes discussions of sexual assault.
The Martian Army marches six miles past "the northwest corner of Phoebe, the only city on Mars" (66), on their way to the launch site, where ships will take them to Earth. Boaz and Unk march together. Unk holds a live grenade in his hand with the pin removed. He throws it into a sewer grate and, as the soldiers scatter, he escapes into Phoebe "in search of his wife and son and his best friend" (67).
Chrono is named after a month of the Martian calendar. Other months include Rumfoord, Kazak and Salo. The name Salo refers to "a messenger from another galaxy who was forced down on Titan by the failure of a part in his spaceship’s power plant" (68). Rumfoord met Salo on Titan. Salo has spent 200,000 years on Titan as he waits for a replacement part for his broken spaceship, a vehicle which is fueled by "the Universal Will to Become" (68). UWTB is the most powerful force yet discovered in the universe.
Chrono was conceived on the journey to Mars. Children are rarely actually conceived on Mars as the society has no real use for them. Chrono plays German batball with his school mates. When someone calls Chrono's name, Unk watches his son step up to bat. Chrono kisses his good luck charm, a "short strip of metal" (69) that he found on the floor of a flamethrower factory during a school trip. Unk convinces the teacher that he needs to talk to his son. When they are alone, he tries to tell Chrono what he knows but Chono is uninterested. He does not care about Unk's "baloney" (71) and only wants to return to the game, even when Unk begins to cry.
Beatrice teaches deep space breathing techniques to new recruits in a school in Phoebe. The Schleimann breathing technique allows people to exist in a vacuum or oxygen-free environment "without the use of helmets or other cumbersome respiratory gear" (72). All they have to do is regularly swallow "goofballs" (73) and learn to close their mouths and nostrils. Like the recruits, Beatrice has recently had her memory wiped. She is still allowed to see Chrono but only "on Tuesday evenings" (73). Unk knocks on the door of her classroom, announcing himself as a messenger. She does not recognize him. Unk tells her about their relationship and shares his plans to escape with both her and Chrono, giving her a hand grenade. The "pale blue" (75) recruits in the classroom realize that Unk is a deserter but they are too deep into their Schleimann breathing exercise to object. He threatens them with a rifle, then disguises himself among them while Beatrice tries to continue teaching. However, since Unk has not had the right preparation for the low oxygen environment, he soon "noiselessly" (76) passes out.
Unk comes to on the Martian mothership, dressed in a uniform. Rumfoord and Kazak enter his bunk and seem to know Unk well. Unk, unsure of Rumfoord's identity, guesses that this is his friend Stony Stevenson. Rumfoord laughs. When Unk worries that his plan has failed, he cries. Rumfoord reveals that he is the real commander of the Martian Army. He tells Unk a story about "a man being carried from Earth to Mars in a flying saucer" (78). He was given the freedom to go anywhere on the spaceship except one room. In this room, he was told, was the most beautiful woman who ever went to Mars. It would be impossible for the man to not immediately fall in love with her. Any man who falls in love, the man is told, becomes a bad soldier. The man, trying to prove his self-control, breaks into the woman's room. He immediately falls in love with her, however, and he is overcome by desire. He rapes the woman. Afterward, he regrets his actions. He realizes that he knew the woman on Earth. When he discovers that she is pregnant, he is desperate "to win her love, and through her, to win the love of her child" (79). However, he could never quite succeed.
Boaz appears. He warns Rumfoord that the men will soon expect to see both their leader and the mothership as the invasion begins. Rumfoord is dismissive, mentioning that the men will soon be dying for a good cause, so this will not matter. He tells Unk and Boaz to take control of the mothership. Returning briefly to the story, he mentions that the woman was "still a virgin" (80) when she was raped, even though she had been married for many years.
Chapter 7 Summary: "Victory"
Rumfoord is the writer of the most authoritative account of the Martian invasion of Earth. His book Pocket History of Mars says that during the 67-day long war, 149,315 Martian soldiers were killed compared to only 461 Earthlings. Every Martian was "killed, wounded, captured, or […] missing" (81) and the entire Martian society was wiped out. The failure of the Martian Army is attributed to their lack of leadership and weapons. After taking control of Earth's moon, the Martians made very dramatic threats but lacked the ability to deliver on their intimidating words. The Earthlings shot "617 thermo-nuclear devices" (82) at the moon and immediately killed more than 15,000 Martian commandos by also hitting a transport ship. When the remaining Martians finally landed on Earth, they were so spread out as to be utterly ineffective. They were "butchered promptly" (83), not just by Earth's soldiers, but by regular people. When a Martian threatened that more attacks would follow, the Earth’s militaries launched a strike against Mars itself and destroyed Phoebe. There is now "not a soul" (83) left on Mars, as all the women, children, and elderly Martians were sent to Earth as a final wave of doomed attackers. When these were also killed by the Earthlings, a great sense of shame and regret was felt everywhere on Earth.
This spectacular failure was orchestrated by Rumfoord with the help of his butler Moncrief and Salo, who handled the "technological know-how" (84). Salo is a messenger ship sent from Tralfamadore, a distant and very advanced planet in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Salo has broken down, but even in his broken state he is far more advanced than any human technology. He has a reserve of the Universal Will to Become, which is used to power the Martian spaceships. In the aftermath, Rumfoord has "a plausible new religion to introduce at the war's end" (85). He convinces people that the Martians were actually saints and their pathetic attack was intentionally designed to unite humanity.
Beatrice and Chrono leave Mars on one of the last ships before Phoebe is destroyed. Their ship lands in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Onboard the mothership, Boaz and Unk discover that the ship is preprogrammed to fly to Mercury, rather than to Earth. This "automatic pilot-navigator" (86) was designed by Rumfoord to keep Unk safe from the war. Boaz and Unk quickly become bored on the long flight to Mercury. Elsewhere on Earth, Rumfoord materializes twice during the course of the war. Tickets are sold to the materializations and Rumfoord promotes his new Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. The religion's motto is: "Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself" (87). The religion preaches that humans are too powerless to have any influence on God and that they should not be foolish to count something as random as luck as the will of God. To justify his religion, Rumfoord makes predictions about the future. He uses the story of Malachi Constant like a parable of a foolish and lucky man and promises to return with a Bible, "revised so as to be meaningful in modern times" (88). Onboard the mothership, Boaz contemplates killing Unk but then realizes that he would much prefer that the two men be friends. He cannot help but laugh at their absurd situation.
Chapter 8 Summary: "In a Hollywood Night Club"
Mercury is a strange planet. Half the planet is always in night, half is always in day. The strange noises made by the planet provide comfort to the odd creatures that the men discover "in the deep caves of Mercury" (90). These creatures are named “harmoniums.”
Unk cries when he thinks about Beatrice, Chrono, and Stevenson, even though the things he weeps for are "all abstractions" (91) that mean very little to a man with no memories. He remembers the name Malachi Constant but it means nothing to him. The mothership lands in the cave system but there is no oxygen outside so the men are stuck in the ship, where they can take their goofballs. At first, they find the harmoniums to be "ghastly" (92). The men try and fail to get the ship to exit the caves. The ship seems stuck. When Boaz gives up, Unk notices that the bioluminescent harmoniums have arranged themselves on the cave wall to spell out the words: "IT'S AN INTELLIGENCE TEST" (95).
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
After reading the letter from himself, Unk decides to take control of his fate. The irony of his attempt is that Malachi Constant has already tried to assert his free will by going against Rumfoord's plans. Unk does the same but only ensures that he is proceeding down Rumfoord's planned path, just as before. Rumfoord relishes this level of control and taunts Unk with a story which is clearly for his own benefit, rather than Unk's benefit. He tells Unk about a man travelling from Earth to Mars. To the audience, this is evidently the story of how Malachi Constant arrived on Mars. To Unk, the names and the situations mean nothing. He is just an audience for Rumfoord, a passive pawn in a wider game who has no choice but to listen to Rumfoord's rants. As with Constant and Beatrice, Unk's attempts to assert free will only serve to demonstrate his own lack of agency. Every time he tries to break free of Rumfoord's control—such as by finding his family—he only does exactly what Rumfoord needs him to do. That Beatrice, Constant, and Unk all try and fail to rebel against Rumfoord's predictions shows the innate human desire for free will, as well as the potentially futile attempt to assert such agency over the world.
A key part of the story that Rumfoord tells Unk concerns Beatrice. According to Rumfoord, Constant travelled aboard a spaceship to Mars and, during the trip, he was goaded into raping a woman who happened to be Beatrice. The story of this rape is buried beneath several abstractions. First, neither Unk nor Beatrice is able to remember it taking place. The memory wipes have removed the incident from their minds but a lingering sense of dread and trauma remains. Even with the technology on Mars, the brutality of the act can never be truly eradicated from the victim or the perpetrator.
Second, Rumfoord is not necessarily a reliable narrator. While most of the events of the story are presented in the omniscient third person narration, this act of sexual violence is contained within a piece of dialogue. The event is narrated by Rumfoord, rather than the narrator. Rumfoord has already proven that he cannot be trusted to tell the truth and, due to his dislike of Constant, he has a reason to torture Constant/Unk with stories of the worst thing he has ever done, to the point that he may wish to embellish the story. The story may be impossible to verify but the lingering trauma in Beatrice and Constant's minds suggest that something certainly happened. The trauma and the guilt are too powerful to be undone by a superficial memory wipe. In this sense, these deep-seeded emotions form a foundation of a personality far more than individual memories. Whereas Malachi Constant is replaced by Unk because he forgets the biographical details about his life, both Constant and Unk are overwhelmed by the need to atone for an act they cannot remember or understand. Human identity, this suggests, is constructed more powerfully from negative emotions like trauma and guilt than something like a name.
The failed Martian invasion is another example of Rumfoord's megalomaniacal tendencies. He is so interested in proving his point about God's lack of interest in the human race (and, by proxy, in proving to the world that Malachi Constant is a fraud) that he is willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives. The invasion is planned to fail, to the point where the Martian spaceships are only equipped with navigational technology to get them to Earth. The poorly-equipped, poorly-trained Martian soldiers are, essentially, cannon fodder. Their only requirement is that they be killed in such a quick and easy fashion that the people of Earth feel guilty for having defeated the invasion so easily. By this point in the story, Rumfoord has all but abandoned his humanity. He is a cosmic presence who is completely invested in navigating universe-scale ideas about God and fate. To him, individual lives do not matter, so long as he can prove his point. He does not warn his own wife that she will be raped, nor does he warn his own army that he plans for them to die. In his effort to answer some of the fundamental questions about human existence, Rumfoord ceases to be human. He has become something else entirely.
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By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
