About this Novel

Slaughterhouse Five

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.

Short Summary
Slaughterhouse Five

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.

Character List
Slaughterhouse Five
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.

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.

Major Themes
Slaughterhouse Five
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.

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.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1-2

Slaughterhouse Five

Chapter One:

Summary:

The narrator assures us that the book we are about to read is true, more or less. The parts dealing
with World War II are most faithful to actual events. Twenty-three years have passed since the end
of the war, and for much of that time the narrator has been trying to write about the bombing of
Dresden. He was never able to bring make the project work. When he thinks about Dresden's place
in his memory, he always recalls two things: an obscene limerick about a man whose penis has let
him down, and "My Name is Yon Yonson," a song which has no ending. 

Late some nights, the narrator gets drunk and begins to track down old friends with the telephone.
Some years ago he tracked down Bernard O'Hare, an old war buddy of his, using Bell Atlantic phone
operators. When he tracked his old friend down, he asked if Bernard would help him remember
things about the war. Bernard seemed unenthusiastic. When the narrator suggests the execution of
Edgar Derby, an American who stole a teapot from the ruins, as the climax of the novel, Bernard still
seems unenthusiastic. 

The best outline the narrator ever made for his Dresden book was on a roll of wallpaper, using
crayon. Colors represented different people, and the lines crisscrossed when people met, and ended
when they died. The outline ended with the exchange of prisoners who had been liberated by
Americans and Russians. 

After the war, the narrator went home, married, and had kids, all of whom are grown now. He
studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, and in anthropology he learned that "there was
absolutely no difference between anybody," and that "nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting."
He's worked various jobs, and tried to keep up work on his Dresden novel all this time. 

He actually did go to see Bernard O'Hare just a few weeks after finding him over the telephone. He
brought his young daughters, who were sent upstairs to play with O'Hare's kids. The men could not
think of any particularly good memories or stories, and the narrator noticed that Mary, Bernard's
wife (to whom Slaughterhouse Five is dedicated), seemed very angry about something. Finally, she
confronted him: the narrator and Bernard were just babies when they fought. Mary was angry
because if the narrator wrote a book, he would make himself and Bernard tough men, glorifying war
and turning scared babies into heroes. The movie adaptation would then star "Frank Sinatra and John
Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men" (14). Wars would look good,
and we would be sure to have more of them. The narrator promised that it won't be that kind of
book, and that he'd call it The Children's Crusade. He and Mary were friends starting at that moment.
That night, he and Bernard looked through Bernard's library for information on the real Children's
Crusade, a war slightly more sordid than the other crusades. The scheme was cooked up by two
monks who planned to raise an army of European children and then sell them into slavery in North
Africa. Sleepless later that night, the narrator looked at a history of Dresden published in 1908. The
book described a Prussian siege of the city in the eighteenth century. 

In 1967, the narrator and O'Hare returned to Dresden. On the flight over, the narrator got stuck in
Boston due to delays. In a hotel in Boston, he felt that someone had played with all the clocks. With
every twitch of a clock, it seemed that years passed. That night, he read a book by Roethke and
another book by Erika Ostrovsky. The Ostrovsky book, Céline and His Vision, is a story of a French
soldier whose skull gets cracked during World War I. He hears noises and suffers from insomnia
forever afterward, and at night he writes grotesque, macabre novels. Céline sees death and the
passage of time as the same process. 

The narrator also read about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the hotel room's Gideon
Bible. He calls attention to the moment when Lot's wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt.
He loves her for that act, because it was such a human thing to do. 

Now, he presents us with his war book. He will strive to look back no more. This book, he says, is a
failure. It was bound to be a failure because it was written by a pillar of salt. He gives us the first line
and the last, and the central story of the novel is ready to begin. 

Analysis:

Chapter One asks us to see the author's hand in the novel. This section is written earnestly and
without artifice, more like a disjointed memoir than a work of fiction. Rather than detach the author
from the work, Vonnegut asks us to see him in it. Nor is this the fictional framing of narrator-as-
character: although Vonnegut is often flippant and amusing in specific moments, overall the tone is
too earnest, the subject matter too important, for us to take this is as a mere setup for a novel.
Although equating the narrator with the author is always dangerous, in this book it is safe to say that
the narrator is Kurt Vonnegut. At the very least, Vonnegut wants us to think of the narrator as
Vonnegut. 

One of the most important themes of Slaughterhouse Five is the pairing of narrative and non-
narrative or anti-narrative. Creating narrative (making stories) is a way of making sense of events,
ordering them and arranging them to show cause and effect. Narratives seek to justify themselves
and the events they describe. Slaughterhouse Five can be thought of as an anti-narrative. The novel
is disjointed, with dozens of chronological leaps in every chapter. The statement is clear: Vonnegut
prefers not to make a narrative of the Dresden massacre. His goals are sensitive to the anxieties of
Mary O'Hare. This book will not be the kind of story that could be adapted as a John Wayne movie.
Narratives are often used to make sense of events, and there is no way to make sense of a massacre.
Nor should there be. 

The struggle with creating a narrative is part of why it took the narrator so long to write the book.
When he talks to Bernard O'Hare about the climax of his planned Dresden book, the idea of a novel
with climax, plot, characters, and all of the other tricks of the novelist's trade seems ridiculous next
to the reality of the massacre. O'Hare's cold response to Vonnegut drives home the difficulty of
putting together a narrative about the event. Everything seems inadequate and incredibly detached
from the actual bombing. The linear outline he makes with crayon on a roll of wallpaper drives home
the same point. By juxtaposing the crayon-on-wallpaper outline with the events of the end of the
war, the idea of linear narrative is made to look like child's play. What real connection can there be
between the massacre and crayon marks drawn on paper used to wipe up feces? 

Another important theme of the novel is time and memory. The Tralfamadorian concept of time
holds that all events happen simultaneously, and thus they always exist. Billy leaps through time,
and we are given the story of his life in pieces. However, many of the key events in the past are not
related after a leap in time. Some are recalled through good old-fashioned memory. Memory is the
human answer to the Tralfamadorian fourth dimension. Memory means that for humans, too, events
continue to exist long after they have ended chronologically. After an atrocity like Dresden, the
survivors have their scars. Dresden has continued to haunt Vonnegut in the twenty-three years
afterward. The story of Lot's wife warns that to look back means being frozen in time, paralyzed
forever. But it is also, according to Vonnegut, the human thing to do. 

Repetition of phrases and images is an important part of the novel. A few of the phrases and images
in Chapter One will resurface later on. These repetitions help to create a sense of connection
between events, although the connections are not often logical or linear. The repetitions are too
numerous for this study guide to always point them out; a careful reader will be able to notice many
of them on a first read. One of the most important repetitions is the famous response to every new
death. With the report of each new death, the narrator always says, "So it goes." We first hear it in
Chapter One. This repeated sentence is one of great acceptance and resignation, but it does not
necessarily soothe the reader. There is resignation, but not resignation without anger: when Dresden
is destroyed and over 130,000 people die, and the narrator comments, "So it goes," Vonnegut is not
necessarily speaking to us with a voice of bland acceptance. The repetition of the sentence becomes
almost maddening. Although there is an element of acceptance in the statement, at times it highlights
death rather than dismisses it. 

The preoccupation with time is already here in Chapter One. Time and its meaning is a broad theme
for the novel. Because of the force of his Dresden memories, in some sense his life has already
ceased to be linear. Vonnegut uses the children's song about Yon Yonson as a metaphor for his
feelings about Dresden. The last line of the song is the first, and so there is no escape, no clean way
to end it. His feeling in the Boston hotel that the clocks have gone crazy also returns us to this theme
of time knocked out of whack, foreshadowing the time travel of Billy Pilgrim. The Ostrovsky novel's
equation of time's passage with death further develops the theme of time, acting as a
counterpoint/complement to the rosy view of time taken by Billy Pilgrim's alien abductors. 

Chapter Two:

Summary:

"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." He wanders from moment to moment in his life,
experiencing chronologically disparate events right after one another. He sees his birth and death and
everything in between, all out of order, with no pattern to predict what will come next. Or so he
believes. 

Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. Tall, thin, and embarrassingly weak, he made an
unlikely soldier. He was going to night school in optometry when he got drafted to fight in World
War II. His father died in a hunting accident before Billy left for Europe. The Germans captured
Billy during the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945 he returned to the States, finished optometry school,
and married the daughter of the school's owner. During the engagement, he was hospitalized for a
nervous breakdown. After his release, he finished school, married the girl, got his own practice with
help from his father-in-law, became quite rich, and had two kids. In 1968 he was the sole survivor of
a plane crash. While he was in the hospital, his wife died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He returned
home for rest, but without warning one day he went to New York and claimed on the radio that he
had been kidnapped by aliens called Tralfamadorians. Billy's daughter, Barbara, retrieved him from
New York. A month later, Billy wrote a letter to Ilium's newspaper describing the aliens. The
Tralfamadorians are shaped like two-foot tall toilet plungers, suction cup down. 

We now see Billy working on a second letter describing the Tralfamadorian conception of time. All
time happens simultaneously, so a man who dies is actually still alive, since all moments exist at all
times. Billy works on his letter, oblivious to the increasingly frantic shouts of his daughter, who has
stopped by to check on him. The burden of caring for Billy has made Barbara difficult and
unforgiving. 

We move to the first time Billy gets unstuck in time. Billy receives minimal training as a chaplain's
assistant before being shipped to Europe. He arrives in September of 1944, right in the middle of the
Battle of the Bulge. He never meets his chaplain or gets a proper helmet or boots. Although he
survives the onslaught, he wanders behind German lines, tagging along with two scouts and an anti-
tank gunner named Roland Weary. Weary repeatedly saves Billy's life, mostly by not allowing him
to lie down in the snow and die. Although the scouts are experienced, Weary is as new to the war as
Billy is; he just fancies himself as having more of a taste for it. By firing the anti-tank gun
incorrectly, his gun crew put scorch marks into the ground. Because of those marks, the position of
the gun crew was revealed to a Tiger tank that fired back. Everyone but Weary was killed. He is
stupid, fat, cruel, and violent. Back in Pittsburgh he was friendless, and constantly getting ditched.
His father collects torture devices. He carries a cruel trench knife, various pieces of equipment that
have been issued to him, and a pornographic photo of a woman with a horse. He plagues Billy with
macho, aggressive conversation. In his own mind, Weary narrates the war stories he will one day
tell. Although he is almost as clumsy and slow as Billy, he imagines himself and the two scouts as
fast friends. In his head he dubs them and himself the Three Musketeers, and tells himself the story
of how the Three Musketeers saved the life of a dumb, incompetent college kid. 

Straggling behind the others, Billy becomes unstuck in time. He goes back to the red light of pre-
birth and then forward again to a day in his childhood with his father at the YMCA. His father tries
to teach him how to swim by the sink-or-swim method. Billy sinks, and someone has to rescue him.
He jumps forward to 1965, when he is a middle-aged man visiting his mother in a nursing home.
Then he jumps to 1958, and Billy is attending his son's Little League banquet. Leap to 1961: Billy is
at a party, totally drunk and cheating on his wife for the first and only time. Then, he is back in 1944,
being shaken awake by Weary. Weary and Billy catch up to the scouts. Dogs are barking in the
distance, and the Germans are searching for them. Billy is in bad shape: he looks like hell, can barely
walk, and is having vivid (but pleasant) hallucinations. Weary tries to be chummy with his supposed
buddies, the scouts, grouping himself with them as "the Three Musketeers." The scouts coldly tell
him that he and Billy are on their own. 

Billy goes to 1957, when he gives a speech as the newly elected president of the Lion's Club.
Although he has a momentary bout of stage fright, his speech is beautiful. He has taken a public
speaking course. 

He leaps back to 1944. Ditched again, Weary starts to beat Billy up, furious that this weak college
kid has cost him his membership in "the Three Musketeers." He cruelly beats Billy, who is in such a
state that he can only laugh. Suddenly, Weary realizes that they are being watched by five German
soldiers and a police dog. They have been captured. 

Analysis:

Billy's name is a symbol of his innocence. He chooses the child's form, "Billy" rather than
"William," and his last name of Pilgrim has symbolic significance. He is on a journey, and "pilgrim"
here strongly intimates innocence. He is more like a naïve traveler than a warrior or hardened
ascetic. He is not a conventional war hero. Vonnegut chooses to make Billy weak, fearful,
incompetent, and mentally unstable. He refuses to glorify war by creating a glamorous hero; instead,
he gives us Billy. 

Billy's hometown is Ilium, another name for the city of Troy, the doomed city under siege in the
Iliad of Homer. The allusion only reinforces the contrast between Billy and a glorious war hero.
Ilium is the city that lost; its people were either butchered, scattered, or enslaved. Billy's hometown
is named after a city that was destroyed by war. 

The theme of narrative versus non-narrative is apparent in Weary's self-aggrandizing war stories,
which the stupid man expends energy inventing even before he has survived the war. Billy's
chronological jumping and unglamorous military experience provides a cold contrast to the hokey
fantasies of the anti-tank gunner. Weary's fantasies come in part from a deep loneliness; a great part
of the fantasy is the idea of camaraderie, which Weary has never had before. Weary's real situation is
a contrast to his fantasies. He incorrectly fired a shot at a tank and survived by pure luck. Neither the
scouts nor Billy can stomach his company. His own narration of the war attempts to turn him into a
hero, ignoring pressing dangers and the decidedly unglamorous aspects of his military experience so
far. Vonnegut juxtaposes the reality with Weary's narrative to throw all war stories into question. He
refuses to give us a hero, and he makes conventional war stories seem preposterous. There is no
place here for swelling music or daring deeds. Not enough narrative structure or heroism has showed
up to make war look anything other than miserable. The scouts are good soldiers, but they take the
non-heroic and necessary path when they abandon their countrymen. In another kind of novel, one
closer to the kind of narrative made up by Weary and feared by Mary O'Hare, these scouts might be
the central characters. But they are peripheral here, and their deaths will be as quick and inglorious
as any in Slaughterhouse Five.
Summary and Analysis of Chapters 3-4
Slaughterhouse Five

Chapter Three:

Summary:

The troops who capture Billy and Weary are irregulars, newly enlisted men using the equipment of
newly dead soldiers. Their commander is a tough German corporal, whose beautiful boots are a
trophy from a battle long ago. Once, while waxing the boots, he told a soldier that if you stared into
their shine you could see Adam and Eve. Though Billy has never heard the corporal's claim, looking
into the boots now he sees Adam and Eve and loves them for their innocence, vulnerability, and
beauty. A blond fifteen-year-old boy helps Billy to his feet; he looks as beautiful and innocent as
Eve. In the distance, shots sound out as the two scouts are killed. Waiting in ambush, they were
found and shot in the backs of their heads. 

The Germans take Weary's things, including the pornographic picture, which the two old men grin
about, and Weary's boots. The fifteen-year old gets Weary's boots, and Weary gets the boy's clogs.
Weary and Billy are made to march a long distance to a cottage where American POWs are being
detained. The soldiers there say nothing. Billy falls asleep, his head on the shoulder of a Jewish
chaplain. 

Billy leaps in time to 1967, although it takes him a while to figure out the date. He is giving an eye
exam in his office in Ilium. His car, visible outside his window, has conservative stickers on the
bumper; the stickers were gifts from his father-in-law. 

He leaps back to the war. A German is kicking his feet, telling him to wake up. The Americans are
assembled outside for photographs. The photographer takes pictures of Billy's and Weary's feet as
evidence of how poorly equipped the American troops are. They stage photos of Billy being
captured. Billy then returns to 1967, driving to the Lion's club. He drives through a black ghetto, an
area recovering from recent riots and fires. He largely ignores what he sees there. At the Lion's club,
a marine major talks about the need to continue the fight in Vietnam. He advocates bombing North
Vietnam into the Stone Age, if necessary, and Billy does not think of the horror of bombing, which
he has witnessed himself. He is simply having lunch. The narrator mentions that he has a prayer on
the wall of his office: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to
change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference." The narrator tells us that Billy
cannot change past, present, or future. 

After lunch, Billy goes home. He is a wealthy man now, with a son in the Green Berets and a
daughter about to get married; he also is seized occasionally by sudden and inexplicable bouts of
weeping. During one of these spells, he closes his eyes and finds himself back in World War II. He
is marching with an ever-growing line of Americans making their way through Luxembourg. They
cross into Germany, being filmed by the Germans who want a record of their great victory. Weary's
feet are sore and bloody from marching on the German boy's clogs. The Americans are sorted by
rank, and a colonel tries to talk with Billy. The colonel is dying; he tries to be chummy with Billy.
He has always wanted to be called "Wild Bob" by his men. He dreams of having a reunion of his
men in his hometown of Cody, Wyoming. He invites Billy and the other men to come. Vonnegut
mentions that he and Bernard O'Hare were there when the colonel gave his invitation. All of the
POWs are put into train cars. The train does not leave for two days; during that time Wild Bob dies.
The boxcars are so crowded that to sleep the men have to take turns lying down. When the train
finally begins its trek deeper into Germany, Billy jumps through time again. It is 1967, and he is
about to be kidnapped for the first time by the Tralfamadorians. 

Analysis:

The sight of Adam and Eve in the corporal's boots and the beauty of the fifteen-year-old boy are
contrasts to the grittiness of war. These images are of vulnerability and innocence. By making Billy's
hallucination echo what the corporal himself has said, Vonnegut makes the vision in the boots
something slightly more than a hallucination. Billy is gazing on a fantasy of unspoiled human
innocence, one longed for by both Germans and Americans, but that innocence appears in the boots
that were stripped as a trophy from a dead soldier. The fifteen-year-old is a picture of youth and
beauty, but he will not remain innocent for long. Vonnegut focuses on the loss of innocence here: he
makes a parallel between Adam and Eve and the young boy. Though Adam and Eve appear in the
boots as they did in Eden, vulnerable and naked, we know that after Eden came the fall. Their
innocence is also complicated by the fact that their image appears in boots that are spoils of war.
Adam and Eve symbolize the innocence and lost innocence that the young boy embodies. Note that
the older soldiers grin together about Weary's pornographic photo, with the young boy left out of
their crude jokes and leering. But the young boy will inevitably lose his innocence; though for now
he is new to war, time and experience will put blood on his hands. Vonnegut chooses to focus on the
beauty of this boy, pre-war, rather than the steely manhood of, say, the nearby scouts. The boy is
compared to Eve rather than Adam, emphasizing his distance from manhood and his vulnerability.
Vonnegut does not depict the heroic beauty of men like the scouts. The scouts, in fact, die a very
unglamorous death. Trying to lie in ambush for the enemy, they are shot from behind, denied even
the dignity of facing their killer. Again and again, Vonnegut chooses to focus on what is lost in
wartime, rather than depict the heroism of soldiers. One of the only moments of heroism in the entire
novel occurs much later, and it happens far from the battlefield. 

The theme of narrative and anti-narrative is here again. Notice that the Germans, some of the
greatest producers of war narrative ever, are constantly constructing narratives. They take misleading
pictures of Weary's feet to prove that U.S. soldiers lack proper equipment, even though Weary's
boots were taken from him and his current shoes were originally on the feet of a German soldier.
They stage photos of Billy's capture, making a story in pictures that fits ideas of what a capture is
supposed to look like; note that the phony picture looks much more like our idea of a capture than
the carnival-like reality of Billy's actual capture. The pathetic Wild Bob dreams of having his men
call him "Wild Bob," although so far the name only sticks with irony. He hopes to have a great,
manly reunion in Wyoming, although in truth he will not even survive the war. Nor will his death be
a glorious battlefield martyrdom. He will die from illness. The more familiar styles of war narrative
are very different from what Vonnegut gives us in the novel. We are given the story of war in
jumbled fragments, with the focus on a character who is not in the slightest bit heroic. 

These scenes of Billy in 1967 tell us important things about his character. He is deeply passive. The
bumper stickers on his Cadillac are not even his own; they are gifts from his father. When Billy
drives through the ghetto, he chooses to ignore the suffering there. When a black man taps on his
window, wanting to talk about something, Billy does the easy thing: he drives on. When the marine
major lectures about the need to bomb Vietnam, Billy is silent. He just keeps having in lunch. These
scenes are important social commentary. Keep in mind that Slaughterhouse Five was published in
1969, when the Vietnam War was in full swing. More tonnage of explosives was dropped onto
Vietnam than in all of World War II put together, including the two atomic bombs. 

Billy has a very peculiar interpretation of the prayer on his wall. If he cannot change past, present, or
future, than what is left? Billy's indifference should not be mistaken as Vonnegut's. Although Billy
believes in aliens and the fixed nature of fate, Vonnegut does not intend for the reader to take these
things as the important lessons of the book. At times, Vonnegut seems to despair of being able to
change the world with a book, but Billy's maddening acceptance and silence are not being offered as
the admirable way to act. Billy's acceptance is in direct opposition to Vonnegut's own attitude put
forward in Chapter One. Vonnegut tells his sons that they are never to participate in massacres; in
contrast, Billy's son is a Green Beret in Vietnam. Vonnegut struggled for over two decades to write
an "anti-war book" about Dresden, and his concerns are for the "babies," the children who fight in
wars. The reader should not take Billy's Tralfamadorian philosophy as Vonnegut's. 

Chapter Four:

Summary:

In 1967, on his daughter's wedding night, Billy cannot sleep. Because he is unstuck in time, he
knows that he will soon be kidnapped by a Tralfamadorian flying saucer. He kills time
unproductively in the meantime. He watches a war movie, and because he is unstuck in time the
movie goes forward and then backward. He goes out to meet the ship, and he is taken as planned. As
the ship shoots out into space, Billy is jarred back to 1944. In the boxcar, none of the men want Billy
to sleep next to them because he yells and thrashes in his sleep. He is forced to sleep while standing.
In another car, Weary dies of gangrene in his feet. As he slowly dies over the course of days, he tells
people again and again about the Three Musketeers. He also asks that someone get revenge for him
on the man who caused his death. He blames Billy Pilgrim, of course. 

The train finally arrives at a camp, and Billy and the other men are pushed and prodded along. The
camp is full of dying Russian POWs. At points, Vonnegut likens the Russians' faces to radium dials.
The Americans are all given coats; Billy's is too small. They go into a delousing station, where all of
the men strip naked. Billy has one of the worst bodies there; he is skinny and weak, and a German
soldier comments on that fact. We are introduced briefly to Edgar Derby and Paul Lazarro. Derby is
the oldest POW there, a man who pulled strings to get into the army. He is a high school teacher
from Indianapolis, and he is physically sturdy despite his forty-four years of age. He will be shot
after the Dresden bombing for trying to steal a teapot. Paul Lazarro is a car thief from Illinois. His
body is even weaker and less healthy than Billy's. He was in Roland Weary's boxcar, and he vowed
solemnly to Weary that he would find and kill Billy Pilgrim. When the scalding water turns on, Billy
leaps back to his infancy. His mother has just finished giving him a bath. He then leaps forward to a
Sunday game of golf, played with three other optometrists. Then, he leaps in time to the space ship,
on his first trip to Tralfamadore. He talks with one of his captors about time, and he says that the
Tralfamadorians sound like they do not believe in free will. The alien replies that in all of the
inhabited planets of the galaxy, Earth is the only one whose people believe in the concept of free
will. 

Analysis:

The movie Billy watches is both a sweet and gentle dream and another comment on the impossibility
of replacing the things lost in war. When Billy watches the movies in reverse, he sees bombers
sucking up fire into capsules that fly up for storage; German fighters magically pull the bullet holes
out of bombers and heal the wounds of aircrews. The planes land backwards. Billy extrapolates: the
capsules are returned to America, where women work to disassemble and make sure that the
destructive things inside will never be able to harm anyone. Hitler becomes a baby. All people
become babies, generation after generation, returning to "two perfect people named Adam and Eve"
(75). Vonnegut is invoking Adam and Eve again as symbols of innocence and the loss of innocence.
The theme of narrative and anti-narrative is here in a different form, pairing a war story with its
mirror image. By putting the movie in reverse, Vonnegut provides a reversed war story. The
machinery of war is used to heal, rather than hurt. The expense and effort of war is for the aid of
humanity, rather than to kill. The conclusion is a return to the beauty and perfection of Adam and
Eve. But this reversed narrative is only a fantasy. Watching films in reverse is always slightly comic,
not possible to take as a real story. The return to Adam and Eve's innocence is impossible. In real
life, we are not unstuck in time. We cannot reverse the losses of war. Death and destruction cannot
really be undone. 

Although Billy is not heroic, Vonnegut makes him an extremely sympathetic character. Weary's
mean-spirited call for revenge is certainly undeserved by Billy. Vonnegut also constantly points out
how weak and unsuitable for war Billy is; it is not his fault that he is no soldier. 

We see the Tralfamadorian concept of time. Because the Tralfamadorians experience all time
simultaneously, they know everything that will happen. The aliens accept fate completely and
without struggle. Billy, unstuck in time, knows everything that will ever happen to him. But are we
meant, as readers of this novel, to learn that fate is fixed? Probably not. The Tralfamadorians are,
after, all, sentient toilet plungers, and Billy is a mentally unhinged man; there are also suggestions
throughout the novel that the aliens are a coping mechanism for Billy, the products of mental
damage from the war and exposure to the writing of Kilgore Trout. But whether or not the aliens are
real does not affect how fate operates within the confines of Billy's story. By setting up fate as
unchangeable within the confines of the Billy Pilgrim story, Vonnegut discounts the possibility of
heroism. He is continuing to play with anti-narrative by making his characters subject to much larger
forces. The individual has no real place in this view; the events and forces are too great for any man
to be a hero. But Vonnegut is not advocating passive acceptance of war and brutality. Remember the
publication date of 1969, and the novel's place as pertinent social commentary on the Vietnam War.
Remember Vonnegut's own insistence in Chapter One that he has told his sons never to participate in
massacres. The acceptance of fixed events occurs within the confines of the Billy Pilgrim story. For
the Billy Pilgrim story, fate operates as a way to preclude any possibility of a conventional heroic
war narrative

. Summary and Analysis of Chapters 5-6

Slaughterhouse Five
Chapter Five:

Summary:

En route to Tralfamadore, Billy asks for something to read. The only human novel is Valley of the
Dolls, and when Billy asks for a Tralfamadorian novel, he learns that the aliens' novels are slim,
sleek volumes. Because they have a different concept of time, Tralfamadorians have novels arranged
by juxtaposition of marvelous moments. The books have no cause or effect or chronology; their
beauty is in the arrangement of events meant to be read simultaneously. Billy jumps in time to a visit
to the Grand Canyon taken when he was twelve years old. He is terrified of the canyon. His mother
touches him and he wets his pants. He jumps forward in time just ten days, to later in the same
vacation. He is visiting Carlsbad Caverns. The ranger turns the lights off, so that the tourists can
experience total darkness. But Billy sees a light nearby: the radium dial of his father's watch. 

Billy jumps back to the war. The Germans think Billy is one of the funniest creatures they've seen in
all of the war. His coat is preposterously small, and on his already awkward body it looks ridiculous.
The Americans give their names and serial numbers so that they can be reported to the Red Cross,
and then they are marched to sheds occupied by middle-aged British POWs. The British welcome
them with singing. These British POWs are officers, some of the first Brits taken prisoner in the war.
They have been prisoners for four years. Due to a clerical error early in the war, the Red Cross
shipped them an incredible surplus of food, which they have hoarded cleverly. Consequently, they
are some of the best-fed people in Europe. Their German captors adore them. To prepare for their
American guests, the Brits have cleaned and set out party favors. Candles and soap, supplied by the
Germans, are plentiful: the British do not know that these items are made from the bodies of
Holocaust victims. They have prepared a huge dinner and a dramatic adaptation of Cinderella. Billy
is so unhinged that his laughter at the performance becomes hysterical shrieking, and he is taken to
the hospital and doped up on morphine. Edgar Derby watches over him, reading The Red Badge of
Courage. He leaps in time to the mental ward where he recovered in 1948. 

In the mental ward, Billy's bed is next to the bed of Elliot Rosewater. Like Billy, he has little love for
life, in part because of things he saw and did in the war. He is the man who introduces Billy to the
science fiction of Kilgore Trout. Billy is enduring one of his mother's dreaded visits. She is a simple,
religious woman. She makes Billy feel worse just by being there. Billy leaps back in time to the
POW camp. A British colonel talks to Derby; after the newly arrived Americans shaved, the British
were shocked by how young they all were. Derby tells of how he was captured: the Americans were
pushed back into a forest, and the Germans rained shells on them until they surrendered. 

Billy leaps back to the hospital. He is being visited by his ugly, overweight fiancée Valencia. He
knew he was going crazy when he proposed to her. He does not want to marry her. She is visiting
now, eating a Three Musketeers bar and wearing a diamond engagement ring that Billy found while
in Germany. Elliot tells her about The Gospel from Outer Space, a Kilgore Trout book. Valencia
tries to talk to Billy about plans for their wedding and marriage, but he is not too involved. He leaps
forward in time to the zoo on Tralfamadore, where he was on display when he was forty-four years
old. The habitat is furnished with Sears and Roebuck furniture. He is naked. He answers questions
posed by the Tralfamadorian tourists. He learns that there are five sexes among the Tralfamadorians,
but the sex difference is only visible in the fourth dimension. On earth there are actually seven sexes,
all necessary to the production of children; earthlings just do not notice the sex difference between
themselves because many of the sex acts occur in the fourth dimension. These ideas baffle Billy, and
they in turn are baffled by his linear concept of time. Billy expects the Tralfamadorians to be
concerned about or horrified by the wars on earth. He worries that earthlings will eventually threaten
all the other races in the galaxy, causing the eventual destruction of the universe. The
Tralfamadorians put their hands over their eyes, which lets Billy know that he is being stupid. The
Tralfamadorians already know how the universe will end: during experiments with a new fuel, one
of their test pilots pushes a button and the entire universe will disappear. They cannot prevent it. It
has always happened that way. Billy correctly concludes that trying to prevent wars on Earth is
futile. The Tralfamadorians also have wars, but they choose to ignore them. They spend their time
looking at the pleasant moments rather than the unpleasant ones; they suggest that humans learn to
do the same. 

Billy leaps back in time to his wedding night. It is six months after his release from the mental ward.
The narrator reminds us that Valencia and her father are very rich, and Billy will benefit greatly from
his marriage to her. After they have sex, Valencia tries to ask Billy questions about the war. She
wants a heroic war story, but Billy does not really respond to her. He has a crazy thought about the
war, which Vonnegut says would make a good epitaph for Billy, and for the author, too: "Everything
was beautiful, and nothing hurt." He jumps in time to that night in the prison camp. Edgar Derby has
fallen asleep. Billy, doped up still from the morphine, wanders out of the hospital shed. He snags
himself on a barbed wire fence, and cannot extract himself until a Russian helps him. Billy never
really says a word to the Russian. He wanders to the latrine, where the Americans are sick from the
feasting. A long period without food followed by a feast almost always results in violent sickness.
Among the sick Americans is a soldier complaining that he has shit his brains out. It is Vonnegut.
Billy leaves, passing by three Englishmen who watch the Americans' sickness with disgust. Billy
jumps in time again, back to his wedding night. He and his wife are cozy in bed. He jumps in time
again, to 1944. It is before he left for Europe; he is riding the train from South Carolina, where he
was receiving his training, all the way back to Ilium for his father's funeral. 

We return to Billy's morphine night in the POW camp. Paul Lazarro is carried into the hospital;
while attempting to steal cigarettes from a sleeping British officer, he was beaten up. The officer is
the one carrying him. Seeing now how puny Lazarro is, the officer feels guilty for hitting him so
hard. But he is disgusted by the American POWs. A German soldier who adores the British officers
comes in and apologizes for the inconvenience of hosting the Americans. He assures the Brits in the
room that the Americans will soon be shipped off for forced labor in Dresden. The German officer
reads propaganda materials written by Howard Campbell, Jr., a captured American who is now a
Nazi. Campbell condemns the self-loathing of the American poor, the inequalities of America's
economic system, and the miserable behavior of American POWs. Billy falls asleep and wakes up in
1968, where his daughter Barbara is scolding him. Barbara notices the house is icy cold and goes to
call the oil-burner man. 

Billy leaps in time to the Tralfamadorian zoo, where Montana Wildhack, a motion picture star, has
been brought in to mate with him. Initially unconscious, she wakes to find naked Billy and thousands
of Tralfamadorians outside their habitat. They're clapping. She screams. Eventually, though, she
comes to love and trust Billy. After a week they're sleeping together. He travels in time back to his
bed in 1968. The oil-burner man has fixed the problem with the heater. Billy has just had a wet
dream about Montana Wildhack. The next day, he returns to work. His assistants are surprised to see
him, because they thought that he would never practice again. He has the first patient sent in, a boy
whose father died in Vietnam. Billy tries to comfort the boy by telling him about the Tralfamadorian
concept of time. The boy's mother informs the receptionist that Billy is going crazy. Barbara comes
to take him home, sick with worry about what how to deal with him. 

Analysis:

Chapter Five is the novel's longest chapter. One of the important recurring themes is human dignity
and the ease with which that dignity can be taken away. The novel deals with a war that saw an
appalling devaluation of human life, and incredible affronts to human dignity. The Holocaust is
alluded to several times in this chapter, as Allied POWs unwittingly use soap and candles made from
human bodies. Edgar Derby's fate is known from when we first meet him; he will be executed by a
firing squad for trying to steal a teapot. Prodded by Valencia, Billy reveals in this chapter that Derby
was doped up when he was shot, barely aware of what was happening. And then of course there is
Billy himself, laughed at by his German captors, insulted with the "gift" of a preposterously small
coat, mentally unhinged, berated by his daughter, annoyed by his mother, married to a woman he
does not respect, and made to parade himself naked in an alien zoo. Chapter Five shows us a parade
of incidents, great and small, in which human dignity is ripped away. Put on display on
Tralfamadore, Billy tells his captors honestly that he is as happy in the zoo as he was on earth. On
his home world, the treatment he received was no better than the treatment he has received as a zoo
specimen; in many ways, the aliens treat him better. 

But Vonnegut also questions the concept of "dignity." Certain interpretations of dignity can become
part of the narrative of war. Americans are insulted for having no dignity by their allies, the British.
The British show disgust for the Americans' illness, even though the feast provided by the Brits is
the direct cause of the illness. Vonnegut is not holding the British up as true examples of the
meaning of dignity. There is something decidedly precious about the officers. For four years, they
have been prisoners, but they also have seen far less action and hardship than their American guests.
Significantly, they are adored by their Nazi captors because they make war "look stylish and
reasonable, and fun" (94). These men are the type that can come up with war stories when the
shooting has stopped, but their stories will be about staying plucky while imprisoned, hoarding food,
hosting disgusting Americans. Those same Americans are coming in from one of the most brutal
battles fought in Western Europe in all of the Second World War. Real war strips dignity away;
Vonnegut refuses to tell a story of soldiers maintaining "dignity" under the pressure of real fighting.
To do so would risk romanticizing war. 

Vonnegut never comforts us in this novel with a sense of cause and effect. He never tries to explain
why war happens or why men act as they do in wartime; explanations are too often molded into
harmful narratives, like the propaganda writing of Howard Campbell, Jr. The Tralfamadorian time
travel premise helps Vonnegut to escape having to explain things. The description of the
Tralfamadorian novel, with its non-linear story and skillful arranging of events, corresponds to what
Vonnegut himself has written. Tralfamadorian philosophy does not provide real comfort to the
reader either; although there is some wisdom in accepting things, the Tralfamadorian insistence on
ignoring everything unpleasant is not a viable solution in real life. The comfort of the novel comes
from Vonnegut's sense of humor and sympathy for human beings, even unlikable ones. And as brutal
as events of the novel can be, Vonnegut makes the whimsical and the wistful an important part of the
pleasure of the book. Billy's wild thought about the war is more a wish than a statement of fact:
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." The wish provides some comfort, although it stands in
direct opposition to what the reader knows was the hard reality. Billy's thought is like a simple,
unimposing fantasy, poignant because it is so modest and childlike. 

It might be worthwhile to briefly look at some of Vonnegut's repetitions. They abound throughout
the book, but because Chapter Five is so long it is easy to find a long list of repetitions here. Feet are
often "ivory and blue": corpses' feet in 1944, as well as Billy's feet in the unheated house in 1967.
For some reason, forty-four comes up again and again. Billy is forty-four when he is kidnapped by
the Tralfamadorians. Billy is captured in 1944. Edgar Derby is forty-four when he dies. Valencia is
eating a Three Musketeers bar when she visits Billy in the hospital, alluding back to the Three
Musketeers narrative imagined by Roland Weary. Billy's father has a watch with a radium dial; the
dial glows in the darkness of Carlsbad Caverns. The Russians have faces like radium dials that glow
from the darkness of night at the POW camp. Vonnegut describes himself as having "breath like
mustard gas and roses," and near the end of the novel the smell of corpses in Dresden is like mustard
gas and roses. A careful reader can find many, many more. These repetitions create the sense that
although the novel is chronologically disjointed, there is a strong connection between events. The
connections are not necessarily cause-and-effect, but they do hint at a larger pattern. Everywhere
Billy goes, he sees repetitions and patterns that may or may not mean something. The repetitions
may also be another allusion to Homer; remember that Billy's hometown is Ilium, another name for
Troy, and the Iliad is the West's greatest war story. Repetition of set phrases is one of the most
striking elements of Homer's style. 

Chapter Six:

Summary:

Billy wakes after his morphine night in POW camp irresistibly drawn to two tiny treasures. They
draw him like magnets; they are hidden in the lining of his coat. It will be revealed later on exactly
what they are. He goes back to sleep, and wakes up to the sounds of the British building a new
latrine. They have abandoned their old latrine and their meeting hall to the Americans. The man who
beat up Lazarro stops by to make sure he is all right, and Lazarro promises that he is going to have
the man killed after the war. After the amused Brit leaves, Lazarro tells Derby and Billy that revenge
is life's sweetest pleasure. He once brutally tortured a dog that bit him. He is going to have all of his
enemies killed after the war. He tells Billy that Weary was his buddy, and he is going to avenge him
by having Billy shot after the war. Because of his time hopping, Billy knows that this is true. He will
be shot in 1976. At that time, the United States has split into twenty tiny nations. Billy will be
lecturing in Chicago on the Tralfamadorian concept of time and the fourth dimension. He tells the
spectators that he is about to die, and urges them to accept it. After the lecture, he is shot in the head
by a high-powered laser gun. 

Back in the POW camp, Billy, Derby, and Lazarro go the theater to elect a leader. On the way over,
they see a Brit drawing a line in the dirt to separate the American and British sections of the
compound. In the theater, Americans are sleeping anywhere that they can. A Brit lectures them on
hygiene, and Edgar Derby is elected leader. Only two or three men actually have the energy to vote.
Billy dresses himself in a piece of azure curtain and Cinderella's boots. The Americans ride the train
to Dresden. Dresden is a beautiful city, appearing on the horizon like something out of a fairy tale.
They are met by eight German irregulars, boys and old men who will be in charge of them for the
rest of the war. They march through town towards their new home. The people of Dresden watch
them, and most of them are amused by Billy's outlandish costume. One surgeon is not. He scolds
Billy about dignity and representing his country and war not being a joke, but Billy is honestly
perplexed by the man's anger. He shows the man his two treasures from the lining of his coat: a two-
carat diamond and some false teeth. The Americans are brought to their new home, a converted
building originally for the slaughter of pigs. The building has a large 5 on it. The POWs are taught
the German name for their new home, in case they get lost in the city. In English, it is called
Slaughterhouse Five. 

Analysis:

Billy's death in the future is described in comic terms. From the high-powered laser beam to the
Chicago "hydrogen-bombed by angry Chinamen," the future looks like a parody of science fiction.
The comic and fantastic elements of Billy's death and his Tralfamadorian experiences suggest that
these sections should be understood in playful terms. The comic elements of the story can still
instruct, but we should not necessarily take Tralfamadorian wisdom at face value. Vonnegut relieves
the pressure of the novel's atrocities by pairing the tragic with the absurd. His sense of humor and
imagination are defense against the world. In a similar way, Billy's escape into a science fiction
world is a relief from the indignities of his real life. 

Billy does not mean to be disrespectful when he dresses himself in the curtain and boots from the
Cinderella play. He is cold and needs better shoes. He is also in a real state, mentally. The surgeon
who scolds him has a certain conception of war, one that has its merits: war is about the loss of
human life, and must be dealt with respectfully. Billy should represent his country. War is not funny.
But Vonnegut's depiction of war seems at odds with the surgeon's comments, and points out some of
the problems with the surgeon's point of view. In the Poetics of Aristotle, Aristotle defines comedy
as art in which people are worse than they are in real life. Worse in this case means sillier, more
stupid, base. In these terms, war is a sick comedy on a grand scale. As Vonnegut depicts it, war is
darkly humorous. Billy is a buffoon, but his ridiculous costume is no worse than the millions of
other undignified things that happen in wartime. It is no more ridiculous than the British offering
Americans a huge feast after they have been deprived of food for days, resulting, of course, in
everyone getting the shits. It is no more ridiculous than pathetic Paul Lazarro threatening men with
death, or poor Edward Derby surviving the Battle of the Bulge only to be shot for trying to steal a tea
pot. And we already know that Vonnegut is skeptical of the idea of representing one's country. The
British behave in ways that the surgeon might respect, but there is something bombastic and hollow
about their high spirits. They have hoarded food while the Russians around them starve. They call
the Americans weak and dirty when these same American troops have just come in from some of the
worst fighting of the war in Western Europe. In all of this, Vonnegut points out how easily human
dignity can be taken away; he also questions the idea of dignity itself, and its place in conventional
war narratives. Dignity has many forms, and some of these forms are of questionable value. 

Irony saturates the circumstances surrounding the American POW camp in Dresden. They are told
before they go that Dresden has no significant industries or military force, and so it will not be
bombed. They expect to be safe. They also are staying at a slaughterhouse, but ironically, the POWs
and their guards are some of the only people who are going to survive the bombing.
Summary and Analysis of Chapters 7-8
Slaughterhouse Five

Chapter Seven:

Summary:

Billy is on a plane next to his father-in-law. Billy and a number of optometrists have chartered a
plane to go to a convention in Montreal. There's a barbershop quartet on board. Billy's father-in-law
loves it when they sing songs mocking the Polish. Vonnegut mentions that in Germany Billy saw a
Pole getting executed for having sex with a German girl. Billy leaps in time to his wandering behind
the German lines with the two scouts and Roland Weary. He leaps in time again to the plane crash.
Everyone dies but him. The plane has crashed in Vermont, and Billy is found by Austrian ski
instructors. When he hears them speaking German, he thinks he's back in the war. He is unconscious
for days, and during that time he dreams about the days right before the bombing. 

He remembers a boy named Werner Gluck, one of the guards. He was good-natured, as awkward
and puny as Billy. One day, Gluck and Billy and Derby were looking for the kitchen. Derby and
Billy were pulling a two-wheeled cart; it was their duty to bring dinner back for the boys. Gluck
pulled a door open, thinking the kitchen might be there, and instead revealed naked teenage girls
showering, refugees from another city that was bombed. The women scream and Gluck shuts the
door. When they finally find the kitchen, an old cook talks with the trio critically and proclaims that
all the real soldiers are dead. Billy also remembers working in the malt syrup factory in Dresden.
The syrup is for pregnant women, and it is fortified with vitamins. The POWs do everything they
can to sneak spoonfuls of it. Billy sneaks a spoonful to Edgar Derby, who is outside. He bursts into
tears after he tastes it. 

Analysis:

Chapter Seven is very short. The plane ride gives Vonnegut an opportunity to criticize the bigotry of
Billy's father-in-law. The old optometrist loves the songs mocking the Polish, but Vonnegut follows
the event with the execution of a real Pole. Vonnegut drives home the connection between the
execution and the songs: the Germans, obsessed with maintaining racial purity, are executing the
Polish man for having had sex with a German woman. Although bigoted songs and hate-motivated
murder are two different things, Vonnegut puts the two events right after each other, suggesting that
there is a significant connection between these different forms of hate. 

Billy's memories of Dresden before the bombing are gentler than many of his other memories of the
war. The moment when the three men stumble into the room of naked women is humorous and also
beautiful. It is completely innocent: Edgar Derby is an old man with a wife, and Billy and Werner
are two boys who are too awkward to be threatening. Neither of them has seen a naked woman
before. Vonnegut creates sympathy for the people of Dresden. The girls are refugees who have lost
their homes to bombing in the nearby city of Breslau; they have survived only to die here in
Dresden. Werner is an innocent, as unsuited for war as Billy. Vonnegut emphasizes the connection
between all men by mentioning that Billy and Werner look like brothers. He also says that the two
boys are actually cousins, something that they never learn. The time in Dresden is peaceful. The war
here is not about glorious battlefield exploits. Instead, we watch the POWs survive as best they can,
sneaking tastes of vitamin-enriched syrup. The syrup becomes a symbol of longing for simple
pleasures, simple happiness. The POWs work in a factory surrounded by the sweet substance, and to
get a taste of it they have to steal small spoonfuls of it. Edgar Derby's tears are enigmatic. Is he
crying because he has been reduced to stealing from a supply of syrup intended for pregnant
women? Is he crying because as a POW so much has been taken from him, and the simple pleasure
of the syrup reminds him of pleasures he used to take for granted? 

Chapter Eight:

Summary:

Howard Campbell, Jr., the American-turned-Nazi propagandist, visits the captives of Slaughterhouse
Five. He wears an elaborate costume of his own design, a cross between cowboy outfit and a Nazi
uniform. The POWs are tired and unhealthy, undernourished and overworked. Campbell offers them
good eating if they join his Free American Corps. The Corps is Campbell's idea. Composed of
Americans fighting for the Germans, they will be sent to fight on the Russian front. After the war,
they will be repatriated through Switzerland. Campbell reasons that the Americans will have to fight
the Soviet Union sooner or later, and they might as well get it out of the way. Edgar Derby rises for
his finest moment. He denounces Campbell soundly, praises American forms of government, and
speaks of the brotherhood between Russians and Americans. Air raid sirens sound, and everyone
takes cover in a meat locker. The firebombing will not occur until tomorrow night; these sirens are
only a false alarm. Billy dozes, and then leaps in time to an argument with his daughter Barbara. She
is worrying about what should be done about Billy. She tells him that she feels like she could kill
Kilgore Trout. 

We move to Billy's first meeting with Trout, which happened in 1964. He is out driving when he
recognizes Trout from the jackets of his books. Trout's books have never made money, so he works
as a newspaper circulation man, bullying and terrorizing newspaper delivery boys. One of Trout's
boys quits, and Billy offers to help Trout deliver the papers on the boy's route. He gives Trout a ride.
Trout is overwhelmed by meeting an avid fan. He has only received one letter in the course of his
career, and the letter was crazed. It was written by none other than Billy's friend from the mental
ward, Elliot Rosewater. Billy invites Kilgore Trout to his anniversary party. 

At the party, Trout is obnoxious, but the optometrists and their spouses are still enchanted by having
an actual writer among them. A barbershop quartet sings "That Old Gang of Mine," and Billy is
visibly disturbed. After giving Valencia her gift, he flees upstairs. Lying in bed, Billy remembers the
bombing of Dresden. 

We see the events as Billy remembers them. He and the other POWs, along with four of their guards,
spend the night in the meat locker. The girls from the shower were being killed in a shallower shelter
nearby. The POWs emerge at noon the next day into what looks like the surface of the moon. The
guards gape at the destruction. They look like a silent film of a barbershop quartet. 

We move to the Tralfamadorian Zoo. Montana Wildhack asked Billy to tell her a story. He tells her
about the burnt logs, actually corpses. He tells her about the great monuments and buildings of the
city turned into a flat, lunar surface. 
We move to Dresden. Without food or water, the POWs have to march to find some if they are to
survive. They make their way across the treacherous landscape, much of it still hot, bits of
crumbling. They are attacked by American fighter planes. The end up in the suburbs, at an inn that
has prepared to receive any survivors. The innkeeper lets the Americans sleep in the stable. He
provides them with food and drink, and goes out to bid them goodnight as they go to bed. 

Analysis:

Before Derby's heroic condemnation of Campbell, Vonnegut points out that his book has no
characters. Most of the people in the book are too sick and tired to really have confrontations with
people; one of war's effects, Vonnegut says, is to discourage people form being characters. His
theme of narrative and anti-narrative is here again. The people of this novel are not heroes. They are
subject to incredible forces much larger than themselves. This is another key theme, emphasized by
Vonnegut's play with narrative. 

Finally, we are at the destruction of Dresden. Although Billy often seems to bounce through life, at
key points he shows the signs of serious damage. The barbershop quartet, the same one that will die
on the plane, makes Billy remember the destruction of Dresden. A sentimental song about a gang of
friends (the kind of gang, incidentally, of which Billy has never been a part) makes him think of the
four guards looking out on their destroyed city. This is not a jump through time. This part is
memory. There is a connection between the Tralfamadorian concept of time and memory; in a real
sense, memory means that events in the past do continue to exist. Here, we do not see the
firebombing of Dresden after one of Billy's leaps through time. He remembers it, an old man
unnerved by a song, and the memory is as real as a time leap. The Tralfamadorian concept of time
may teach us more than their pain-avoiding philosophy. According to the alien view, massacres that
happen are always happening. Time's passage cannot get rid of them. Although Billy and the aliens
choose to try to take comfort from the always-existing quality of events, Billy's near-breakdown and
the return of his memories of Dresden suggest that things are not always so easy. Atrocities cannot
just be ignored.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 9-10

Slaughterhouse Five

Chapter Nine:

Summary:

When Billy is in the hospital in Vermont, Valencia goes crazy with grief. Driving to the hospital, she
gets in a terrible accident. She gears up her car and continues driving to the hospital, determined to
get there even though she leaves her exhaust system behind. She pulls into the hospital driveway and
falls unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning. An hour later, she is dead. 

Billy is oblivious, unconscious in his bed, dreaming and time traveling. In the bed next to him is
Bertram Copeland Ruumford, an arrogant retired Brigadier General in the Air Force Reserve. He is a
seventy-year-old Harvard professor and the official historian of the Air Force, and he is in superb
physical condition. He has a twenty-three year-old high school dropout with an IQ of 103. He is an
arrogant jingoist. Currently he is working on a history of the Air Corp in World War II. He has to
write a section on the success of the Dresden bombing. Ruumfoord's wife Lily is scared of Billy,
who mumbles deliriously. Ruumfoord is disgusted by him, because all he does in his sleep in quit or
surrender. 

Barbara comes to visit Billy. She is in a horrible state, drugged up so she can function after the
recent tragedies. Billy cannot hear her. He is remembering an eye exam he gave to a retarded boy a
decade ago. Then he leaps in time when he was sixteen years old. In the waiting room of a doctor's
office, he sees an old man troubled by horrible gas. Billy opens his eyes and he is back in the
hospital in Vermont. His son Robert, a decorated Green Beret, is there. Billy closes his eyes again. 

He misses Valencia's funeral because he is till too sick. People assume that he is a vegetable, but
actually he is thinking actively about Tralfamadorians and the lectures he will deliver about time and
the permanence of moments. Overhearing Ruumford talk about Dresden, Billy finally speaks up and
tells Ruumford that he was at Dresden. Ruumford ignores him, trying to convince himself and the
doctors that Billy has Echonalia, a condition where the sufferer simply repeats what he hears. 

Billy leaps in time to May of 1945, two days after the end of the war in Europe. In a coffin-shaped
green wagon, Billy and five other Americans ride with loot from the suburbs of Dresden. They found
the wagon, attached to two horses, and have been using it to carry things that they have taken. The
homes have been abandoned because the Russians are coming, and the Americans have been looting.
When they go to the slaughterhouse and the other five Americans loot among the ruins, Billy naps in
the wagon. He has a cavalry pistol and a Luftwaffe ceremonial saber. He wakes; two Germans, a
husband-and-wife pair of obstetricians, are angry about how the Americans have treated the horses.
The horses' hooves are shattered, their mouths are bleeding from the bits, and they are extremely
thirsty. Billy goes around to look at the horses, and he bursts into tears. It is the only time he cries in
the whole war. Vonnegut reminds the reader of the epigraph at the start of the book, an excerpt from
a Christmas carol that describes the baby Jesus as not crying. Billy cries very little. 

He leaps in time back to the hospital in Vermont, where Ruumford is finally questioning Billy about
Dresden. Barbara takes Billy home later that day. Billy is watched by a nurse; he is supposed to be
under observation, but he escapes to New York City and gets a hotel room. He plans to tell the world
about the Tralfamadorians and their concept of time. The next day, Billy goes into a bookstore that
sells pornography, peep shows, and Kilgore Trout novels. Billy is only interested in Kilgore Trout
novels. In one of the pornographic magazines, there is an article about the disappearance of porn star
Montana Wildhack. Later, Billy sneaks onto a radio talk show by posing as a literary critic. The
critics take turns discussing the novel, but when Billy gets his turn he talks about Tralfamadore. At
the next commercial break, he is made to leave. When he goes back to his hotel room and lies down,
he travels back in time to Tralfamadore. Montana is nursing their child. She wears a locket with a
picture of her mother and the same prayer that Billy had on his office wall in Ilium. 

Analysis:

What kind of hero is Billy? What are we to make of his passivity, his total acceptance of events? Is
this wisdom? Or is this the shirking of responsibility? He survived the worst massacre of European
history, but he has raised a son who is involved in a continuous series of massacres in Vietnam.
When Billy comes to in the hospital and sees his son there, he simply closes his eyes again. Is it
because of the injuries, or because his son represents something he would prefer not to look at, one
of those things that the Tralfamadorians taught him to ignore? Vonnegut gives us very little sense of
how Billy worked as a father or a husband; in the interactions we see, he is almost always
completely passive. In his final conversation with Ruumford, he agrees with the professor's
conclusions. Dresden was necessary. Although their reasoning is different, the conclusion is the
same. Is this kind of complete acceptance healthy? 

As stated before, Billy's time travel and the fixed nature of fate means that heroism becomes
impossible. Vonnegut attacks the concept of heroic manhood in other ways; pay attention to
Ruumford, an arrogant and uncompassionate old man married to a girl young enough to be his
granddaughter. She is a trophy; the professor has taken a wife just to reinforce his claim to being a
superman. But Ruumford is totally devoid of compassion, and, like the Tralfamadorians, he is
strangely selective in the writing of his history. The excerpts in his own books indicate that Dresden
was unnecessary, but he seems to have reached the opposite conclusion by the time he is talking to
Billy. And for days he ignores Billy, unwilling to change his view of Billy as a repulsive and useless
person. 

But Vonnegut clearly wants the reader to view Billy with sympathy. The epigraph links Billy to
Christ, as does Billy's sense of his mission to spread the truth about time. Earlier in the book,
Vonnegut talked about the problems with Christ as seen by Kilgore Trout. The gospels only teach
that it is wrong to kill someone if he is well connected. In a Kilgore Trout novel, an alien brings a
new gospel. In it, Christ is not God's son; he is just "a bum," and after his execution God adopts him.
Billy, too, is a bum. He is unheroic, weak, and passive, but the characters that despise him for these
traits often come off far worse than Billy. Vonnegut also makes Billy his own double: in Chapter
One, Vonnegut says that in the war he took a Luftwaffe ceremonial saber as a trophy. In this chapter,
we see Billy take the exact same item. Billy and Vonnegut are born in the same year, 1922. When
talking about Billy's fantastic thought that "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt," he says that
it would make a fitting epitaph for Billy and for Vonnegut, too. 

And although complete acceptance seems problematic, there is a value to acceptance. Billy's
Tralfamadorian adventure at least helps him to come to terms with his own life. He treats everyone
with courtesy, even those who despise him. He does not cast blame on anyone for anything. These
behaviors provide some lessons, but they are only part of the truth. Chapter Nine leaves us with an
illustration of Montana's locket, on which is the prayer asking God for the ability to accept the world
when necessary and change it when possible. 

Chapter Ten:

Summary:

Vonnegut tells us that Robert Kennedy died last night. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated a
month ago. Body counts are reported every night on the news as signs that the war in Vietnam is
being won. Vonnegut's father died years ago of natural causes. He left Billy all of his guns, which
rust. Billy claims that on Tralfamadore the aliens are more interested in Darwin than Jesus. Darwin,
says Vonnegut, taught that death was the means to progress. Vonnegut recalls the pleasant trip he
made to Dresden with his old war buddy, O'Hare. They were looking up facts about Dresden in a
little book when O'Hare came across a passage on the exploding world population. By 2000, the
book predicts, the world will have a population of 7 billion people. Vonnegut says that he supposes
they will all want dignity. 

Billy Pilgrim travels back in time to 1945, two days after the bombing of Dresden. German
authorities find the POWs in the innkeeper's stable. Along with other POWs, they are brought back
to Dresden to dig for bodies. Bodies are trapped in protected pockets under the rubble, and the
POWs are put to work bringing them up. But after one of the workers is lowered into a pocket and
dies of the dry heaves, the Germans settle on incinerating the bodies instead of retrieving them.
During this time, Edgar Derby is caught with a teapot he took from the ruins. He is tried and
executed by a firing squad. 

Then the POWs were returned to the stable. The German soldiers went off to fight the Soviets.
Spring comes, and one day in May the war is over. Billy and the other men go outside into the
abandoned suburbs. They find a horse-drawn wagon, the wagon green and shaped like a coffin. The
birds sing, "Po-tee-weet?" 

Analysis:

The events Vonnegut mentions put the writer in 1968. America is involved in a new war, in which
body counts are reported as signs of progress. He is grounding the events of the novel in current
history. He is making the link between one unnecessary massacre and another. The conversation
with O'Hare brings up the important theme of dignity. The world's population is only getting larger,
and seems as troubled as it ever has been. Vonnegut's comment is caustic, cynical. It suggests that
dignity is something that has always been hard to come by. More people in the world means that
more people will be denied dignity, more people will suffer. 

We finish in Dresden. Vonnegut touches on the massacre one more time by describing the process of
retrieving the bodies. A few more men are added to the death list: a Maori who dies of dry heaves,
and poor Edgar Derby. We are left with that incredible image of waste, and the cruel, small atrocity
of the high school teacher executed for taking a teapot. The disparity between Derby's death and his
crime suggests a larger problem that Vonnegut has with killing as a form of punishment. Throughout
the book, people defend the massacre at Dresden by talking about the Holocaust or the Allied pilots
who faced fighters and anti-aircraft fire. But Vonnegut shows us people in Dresden who probably
had nothing to do with the Holocaust. There is awkward Werner Gluck, as unfit for war as Billy; the
old war widow who complains that all the real soldiers are dead; the teenage girls who survive one
bombing only to die in the next. 

And Vonnegut leaves us with a dual image. It is May, the time of the war's end, and also the time for
the renewal and rebirth of springtime. But Billy and his friends are still finding reminders of death.
Their wagon is shaped like a coffin. They are wandering in suburbs that have become ghost towns,
abandoned by Germans fleeing from the Russian advance. They are looting in the rubble of a dead
city. 

The last line of the novel is the bird's nonsense singing, singing that is posed as a question. The
theme of narrative versus anti-narrative is behind the last line. Narrative, by its nature, makes sense
of events. Everything so far in this novel has warned us that it is impossible to make sense of a
massacre. Vonnegut closes appropriately. It is not only impossible to have answers for a massacre;
here, it is even impossible to ask questions that make sense. Instead, we have an unintelligible
question posed by birds.