Dash Lindsell's Profile

Billy is transported in a crowded railway boxcar to a POW camp in
Germany.

beautiful city of Dresden

Here the prisoners
must work for their keep at various labors, including the manufacture
of a nutritional malt syrup.

Their camp occupies a former
slaughterhouse.

One night, Allied forces carpet bomb the city, then
drop incendiary bombs to create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen
into the blaze, asphyxiating or incinerating roughly 130,000 people.

Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight
meat locker.

They emerge to find a moonscape of destruction, where
they are forced to excavate corpses from the rubble.

After a nervous breakdown, Billy commits himself
to a veterans' hospital and receives shock treatments.

He is not aware of keeping
any secrets from himself, but at his eighteenth wedding anniversary
party the sight of a barbershop quartet makes him break down because,
he realizes, it triggers a memory of Dresden.

But he
feels that the time is ripe to tell the world what he has learned.
Billy has foreseen this moment while time-tripping, and he knows
that his message will eventually be accepted.

protagonists

are often
fascinated by impending doom, mesmerized by the end of time

an attempt to reconcile his personal guilt with that
of the culture of which he is a product expiating in advance the guilt of
destroying the human race in a thermonuclear holocaust

Traven's quest

"The
Terminal Beach"

theme in Ballard's work

freezing of time

fascination with the melted silica which bears the
imprint of the old explosions: