Slaughterhouse Five Study Guide

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Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse Five is a novel written in troubled times about troubled
times. As the novel was being finished in 1968, America saw the assassinations of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In the South, Blacks and their supporters were
struggling to overturn centuries of racial inequality under the law. At times, the struggle
became violent. American values were being convulsed by the coming-of-age of the baby
boomers. Never before had young people felt so certain in their rebellion against their parents
and their parents' values.

The United States was involved in a costly and unpopular war in Vietnam. 1968 saw the
psychologically devastating Tet Offensive, in which the Viet Cong launched a massive
offensive against American and South Vietnamese positions all throughout South Vietnam.
Although the Viet Cong took heavy casualties, the offensive was the true turning point of the
war. To the South Vietnamese people, the offensive proved that the Americans could not
protect them. To the American people, the offensive showed that the war in Vietnam would
be far more costly than the politicians in Washington had promised. The country that had
defeated the Axis powers just over two decades ago was now involved in a morally dubious
and costly war in a Third World country.

In the U.S. opposition to the war grew, but in Vietnam the killing continued. The Americans
would eventually suffer fifty thousand dead, but the Vietnamese would pay a much heavier
price. Millions of Vietnamese died, many of them from heavy bombing. The U.S. dropped
more explosive power onto Vietnam than all of the world's powers had dropped in all of
World War II put together, including the two atomic bombs and the bombing of Dresden and
Tokyo. Vonnegut's novel about the bombing of Dresden was written while American policy
makers and pilots were implementing one of the most brutal bombing campaigns in history.

Although Vonnegut despairs of being able to stop war (he likens being anti-war to being anti-
glacier, meaning that wars, like glaciers, will always be a fact of life), Slaughterhouse Five is
an earnest anti-war novel. Vonnegut's own war experiences turned him into a pacifist. Like
his protagonist, Vonnegut was present at Dresden as a POW when American bombers wiped
the city off the face of the earth. The bombing, which took place on February 13, 1945, was
the most terrible massacre in European history. Over 130,000 people died, putting the death
toll above the 84,000 people who died in the Tokyo bombing and the 71,000 people who died
in Hiroshima. In Europe's long and often bloody history, never have so many people been
killed so quickly. The novel is disjointed and unconventional. Its structure reflects this
important idea: there is nothing you can say to adequately explain a massacre. Part of
Vonnegut's project was to write an antidote to the war narratives that made war look like an
adventure worth having.

This study guide's citations match the 1991 printing of the novel by Dell Books.

Slaughterhouse Five Summary

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1
Slaughterhouse Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a decidedly non-heroic man who has
become "unstuck in time." He travels back and forth in time, visiting his birth, death, all the
moments in between repeatedly and out of order. The novel is framed by Chapters One and
Ten, in which Vonnegut himself talks about the difficulties of writing the novel and the
effects of Dresden on his own life. In between, Billy Pilgrim's life is given to us out of order
and in small fragments. For the sake of clarity, this short summary will put Billy's life in
chronological order, although in the novel every chapter spans events over the course of many
years.

Billy is born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. He grows into a weak and awkward young man,
studying briefly at the Ilium School of Optometry briefly before he is drafted. After minimal
training, he sent to Europe right in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. He is captured
behind German lines; before his capture is the first time he gets unstuck in time.

Billy and the other American POWs are temporarily shipped to a camp full of dying Russians
and a few pampered British officers. The Americans then are moved to Dresden, a beautiful
German city that has no major industries and no significant military presence. No one expects
Dresden to be bombed. But in the span of one night in February of 1945, Dresden is bombed
until almost nothing is left. 130,000 people die. Billy and the other POWs wait out the
bombing in a meat cellar. The next day at noon, the come out and find a landscape that looks
like the surface of the moon. With no food or water, the POWs and four guards trek out to the
suburbs. The American prisoners stay in an innkeepers stable for a while, but soon the
authorities round up POWs to excavate the city for bodies. When that work is over, Billy and
the other men return to the stable to wait out the rest of the war. In May, Russians take the
area and Billy is repatriated.

He goes back to Ilium to finish optometry school. After getting engaged to the daughter of the
school's owner, Billy has a mental breakdown and is committed to a veteran's hospital. There,
he is introduced to the science fiction of Kilgore Trout by a fellow patient. After he is release,
he marries Valencia as planned. Her father is wealthy, and with a little help from him, Billy
grows rich. Billy and Valencia have two children.

On the night of his daughter's wedding, Billy (as he claims) is kidnapped by aliens from the
planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians exist in the fourth dimension, and consquently they
have a completely different view of time. For them, all moments happen simultaneously and
always. They take him to their world and put him in a zoo, where he mates with an actress
called Montana Wildhack. Using a time warp, they return him to a earth almost immediately
after the moment that he left, so no one notices that he has been missing for months. He says
nothing about the events until he suffers head injuries in a plane crash. His wife dies almost
immediately afterward. After he goes home, he runs off to New York and goes on a radio talk
show to talk about his alien abduction experiences and the Tralfamadorian concept of time.
His daughter Barbara, just twenty-one years old, suddenly motherless and with a father who
appears to be mentally unbalanced, takes care of Billy but feels a great deal of resentment and
frustration.

Billy claims to know how he will die. In 1976, after the U.S. is split into petty nations and
Chicago is hydrogen-bombed "by angry chinamen," Billy is killed by a high-powered laser
gun.

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Slaughterhouse Five Character List
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Kurt Vonnegut

The novelist inserts himself in the sections of Chapters One and Ten that frame Billy Pilgrim's
story. For many years, Vonnegut tried to write a book about Dresden but found himself
unable to handle the project. He appears within the Billy Pilgrim story very briefly, in the
literary equivalent of a cameo. The framing sections are vital in clarifying Vonnegut's goals in
writing the novel, among them the publication of an anti-war book.

Bernard O'Hare

Vonnegut's old war buddy, captured with him and held as a POW in Dresden. Vonnegut looks
him up years later so that they can reminisce about their war experiences. But the two men
find they cannot remember anything good.

Mary O'Hare

The novel is dedicated to her. She is Bernard's wife and she initially views Vonnegut's novel-
in-progress critically, worrying that he will write a book that glorifies war.

Billy Pilgrim

An unconventional protagonist for a war novel, Billy is weak, passive, and often ridiculous.
He is totally unsuited for war, and he nearly dies wandering behind German lines during the
Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he becomes an optometrist, marries a rich girl, and comes
to believe that he has been abducted by aliens called Trafalmadorians. He is "unstuck in
time," meaning that he experiences the events of his life out of order again and again.

Roland Weary

An anti-tank gunner who gets captured with Billy. Deeply lonely, he imagines war stories full
of camaraderie and adventure. Dumb, fat, and cruel, he dies of gangrene and blames Billy.

Edgar Derby

Referred to consistently as "poor Edgar Derby" or "poor old Edgar Derby," Derby is a forty-
four-year-old who had to pull strings to be allowed to fight. Back home, he is a high school
teacher. He is shot after the Dresden bombing for stealing a teapot.

Paul Lazarro

Tiny, weak, physically repulsive, Lazarro is foul-tempered and cruel. He talks about tracking
down people after the war to send hitmen after them. He holds that revenge is life's sweetest
pleasure.

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Valencia

Billy's wife. She is the overweight daughter of the owner of Billy's optometry school. She is
completely devoted to Billy. When Billy is injured in a plane crash, she dies of carbon
monoxide poisoning on the way to the hospital.

Barbara

Billy's daughter. She is responsible for him after his injuries and Valencia's death, and the
burden makes her resentful and picky.

Robert

Billy's son. Through he was a troublemaker in high school, Robert goes on to be a Green
Beret who fights in Vietnam.

Slaughterhouse Five Themes

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Time and memory

The science fiction elements of the novel include time travel. Billy leaps in time, experience
his life's events out of order and repeatedly. He learns on the alien world of Trafalmadore that
all time happens simultaneously; thus, no one really dies. But this permanence has its dark
side: brutal acts also live on forever. Memory is one of the novel's important themes; because
of their memories, Vonnegut and Billy cannot move past the Dresden massacre. Billy leaps
back in time to Dresden again and again, but at critical points we see Dresden simply because
Billy relives it in his memory.

Narrative versus non-narrative and anti-narrative

This is a broad theme that encompasses many important ideas. Vonnegut is interested in
protecting his novel from becoming a conventional war narrative, the kind of conventional
narrative that makes war look like something exciting or fun. Throughout the book, we see
narratives of this kind in history texts and the minds of characters. But this novel is more
interested in non-narrative, like the nonsense question asked by birds at the novel's end, or
anti-narrative, like the out-of-order leaping through the many parts of Billy's life. Vonnegut
does not write about heroes. Billy Pilgrim is more like a victim.

The relationship between people and the forces that act on them

This theme is closely connected to the idea of narrative. Vonnegut's characters have almost no
agency. They are driven by forces that are simply too huge for any one man to make much of
a difference. Vonnegut drives home this point by introducing us to the Trafalmadorians and
their concept of time, in which all events are fated and impossible to change.

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Acceptance

One of the book's most famous lines is "So it goes," repeated whenever a character dies. Billy
Pilgrim is deeply passive, accepting everything that befalls him. It makes him able to forgive
anyone for anything, and he never seems to become angry. But this acceptance has it
problems. When Billy drives through a black ghetto and ignores the suffering he sees there,
we see the problem with complete acceptance. Vonnegut values the forgiveness and peace
that come with acceptance, but his novel could not be an "anti-war book" if it called on
readers to completely accept their world.

Human dignity

In Vonnegut's view, war is not heroic or glamorous. It is messy, often disgusting, and it robs
men of their dignity. The problem of dignity comes up again and again in the novel, as we see
how easily human dignity can be denied by others. But Vonnegut also questions some
conceptions of dignity; he sees that they have a place in creating conventional war narratives
that make war look heroic.