Billy first mentions the barbershop quartet as among the dead during the plane crash. They come up again in chapter eight and perform at Billy and Valencia's eighteenth wedding anniversary. The song they performed began to upset Billy. The song upset him so much that the others present thought he might be having a heart attack due to his facial expressions and actions. When asked by Kilgore Trout if he had seen the past or future, he simply responded "no." I find this interesting after reading it the second time because the root cause did seem to be a result of what he had experienced in the past. Therefore, he must have been upset from the incident being stored in his subconscious since he did not fully understand the root cause himself. When Billy traveled in time later in the chapter, he was back in Dresden , post bombing. Four guards were standing together "experimenting with one expression and then another." This statement is reminiscent of the barbershop quartet when described by Vonnegut as making the quartet slow, "agonized experiments with chords." Billy thought the guards looked like a barbershop quartet and imagined them singing the same words that had made him so upset the night of his anniversary. The root cause of Billy's distress during the party is now revealed - the barbershop quartet brought back the painful memories of being in Dresden when it was bombed.
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