A 70-year-old Harvard professor and the official Air Force Historian, Bertram C. Rumfoord recuperates from a skiing injury in the bed next to Billy, who has recently been in his plane crash. Rumfoord at first does not believe that Billy was present at the firebombing of Dresden, and only grudgingly acknowledges the horrors Billy must have seen.
Bertram C. Rumfoord Quotes in Slaughterhouse-Five
The Slaughterhouse-Five quotes below are all either spoken by Bertram C. Rumfoord or refer to Bertram C. Rumfoord. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 9
Quotes
The staff thought Rumfoord was a hateful old man, conceited and cruel. He often said to them . . . that people who were weak deserved to die. Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.
Related Characters:
Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Bertram C. Rumfoord
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
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Bertram C. Rumfoord Character Timeline in Slaughterhouse-Five
The timeline below shows where the character Bertram C. Rumfoord appears in Slaughterhouse-Five. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9
...Billy is in a hospital room in Vermont with a Harvard professor named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, who has broken a leg skiing. Rumfoord's fifth wife, Lily, who is twenty-three (Rumfoord is...
(full context)
Lily has brought Rumfoord a Xerox of President Truman’s speech to the Japanese shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima—this...
(full context)
...by awful gas. Billy briefly sees his son in Vermont and misses his wife’s funeral. Rumfoord tells Lily that he needs information about Dresden for his new one-volume history of the...
(full context)
Rumfoord believes Billy is merely repeating what Rumfoord had been saying earlier; he does not believe...
(full context)
...crying He makes.” Billy is back in Vermont, telling the story of the horses to Rumfoord. Rumfoord argues that Dresden was militarily necessary. Billy said it was all right, that “everything...
(full context)
