The Other Three Musketeers

Readers don’t know much about Valencia, but they do know that she eats candy.

Early in the book, when Valencia visits Billy in the veterans’ hospital, the first proper description of her focuses on her eating habits “She was as big as a house because she couldn’t stop eating. She was eating now. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar” (107). Later in that scene readers are notified that “Billy’s fiancée had finished her Three Musketeers Candy Bar. Now she was eating a Milky Way” (110). Then when Billy gets on the plane that later crashes, “Outside the plane, the machine named Valencia Merble Pilgrim was eating a Peter Paul Mound Bar and waving bye-bye” (154).

The specificity of the types of candy is what made these passages stand out to me but I’m not sure why Vonnegut includes them. All three candies are made by large corporations (Mars and Hershey’s). They are all still popular and well-known candies today. They are emblems of the American culture of decadent and uniform mass consumption. How this emblem fits into the larger themes of the book is unclear to me.

Vonnegut could be trying to show that after the war (and the hunger he experienced in it) Billy has become disillusioned with American culture in a small way. Billy is harshly critical of Valencia’s appearance and by extension the eating habits he blames it on: “Billy didn’t want to marry ugly Valencia” (107). However, I think it is more likely that Billy is buying into American culture including beauty and behavioral standards for women in the same way he’s cool with the Lion Club and his son being a green beret.

It is also possible that Vonnegut is showing his own disillusionment with American culture. The Three Musketeers candy calls to mind Roland Weary’s three musketeers, a romantic idea of war that Vonnegut outright mocks. Vonnegut could also be mocking American consumer culture through mocking an idealized diet. Yet for the most part Vonnegut seems to be okay with consumer capitalism. At least when the narrator visits East Germany, he doesn’t value communism any more than capitalism.

Vonnegut could also be using the candy to try to make Valencia a weak character. In the scene in the veteran’s hospital, Vonnegut makes Valencia eating candy out to be a failing of self-control. In the scene by the plane, the Mound Bar is immediately followed by Valencia “waving bye-bye,” the combination of candy and that phrase make her seem juvenile.

The role of candy is complicated by the experience of the narrator in chapter one. The woman writing the article the narrator reports on asks the narrator about the veteran who got smashed in an elevator: “’Did it bother you?’ she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar” (9). Here the candy bar also shows the writer’s heartlessness. She can ask direct questions about a tragic event that she knows the reporter might have personal connections to and doesn’t care enough to give it her full attention, instead focusing partly on the pleasurable experience of eating a candy bar.

The scene with the writer also could show a disconnect between the returned soldier and American culture. The candy bar is still and emblem of American culture. The narrator calls the female writers “beastly girls” and so is obviously upset by them (9). That Vonnegut chooses to portray how beastly they were using the emblem of American culture could show some sort of disillusionment with it. The consumption of the candy bar also follows a mention that women writers “had taken over the jobs of men who’d gone to war,” which links it pretty directly to a cultural change (9).

I think the writer’s and Valencia’s experiences are connected, especially given that they eat the same type of candy: “a Three Musketeers Candy Bar.” Yet in one case the candy shows the consumer is hard-boiled and in the other it shows that she’s weak and I’m not sure how those messages can fit together. I think the negative attitude the narrator and Billy have towards the candy could show a disillusionment with American decadent mass-consumption culture but I’m not sure what role this plays in an anti-war novel. What do you guys think?