Chapter 7 of "Slaughterhouse-Five" focuses more than anything on the lives of the prisoners inside the slaughterhouse before the Dresden air raid. These prisoners are exhausted, weak, and eager to get back home. While working in a factory, they came across a certain syrup that was enriched with vitamins and was meant to be taken by pregnant women. The action of "spooning" soon became quite popular behind the backs of Germans, meaning that prisoners took a spoon and quickly ate a little bit before being found. Billy Pilgrim, at a given moment, finds a window of opportunity and licks a little bit.
"The spoon was a tablespoon. Billy trust it into the vat, turned it around and around, making a gooey lollipop. He thrust it into his mouth. A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy´s body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause". pg. 160.
Billy wasn´t the only one who felt delighted by this little bit of sugary delight. Edgar Derby actually burst into tears. This remembered me of a stand that my mother usually takes when being the host of a lunch or dinner. She always serves extremely late, making the only food available until that hour light snacks, or, as we Colombians call it, "mecato". Why does she do this? Because she is a firm believer that when in hunger, anything tastes ten times as good when in normal conditions. In normal conditions, the syrup would have probably tasted poorly in to Pilgrim, perhaps he only liked it because he was in need of additional strength. Making alusion once more to a popular cliché, "You do not know the value of something until you´ve lost it". Basically, Pilgrim never felt better because of this syrup. But when the war was over and he had become a rich, married man, he never again felt the same gratitude towards anything else. You would think that a war veteran would be more grateful, but then again, Pilgrim never really showed any kind of emotion.
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