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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• Biography of Kurt Vonnegut
• About Slaughterhouse Five
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1-2
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 3-4
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 5-6
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 7-8
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 9-10
• Related Links on Slaughterhouse Five
• Author of ClassicNote and Sources
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• Test Yourself! Quiz 1
• Test Yourself! Quiz 2
• Essays on Slaughterhouse Five
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