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Characters

Narrator

intrusive and anonymous, recurring as a minor character, and as Kurt Vonnegut, himself, when the narrator says: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."^[1]

The narrator begins the story describing his connection to the fire-bombing of Dresden, and his reasons for writing Slaughterhouse-Five.

Billy Pilgrim

A fatalist optometrist ensconced in a dull, safe marriage, in Ilium, New York. He randomly travels in time and is abducted by the "four-dimensional" aliens from planet Tralfamadore. In WWII, he was a POW in Dresden, which has a lasting effect on his post-war life. His time travel occurs among disparate times of his life, re-living events past and future, and, so, becomes fatalistic (though not defeatist), because he has seen when, how, and why he will die.

Roland Weary

A weak man dreaming of grandeur and obsessed with gore and vengeance, he "saves" Billy several times (despite Billy's protests) in hopes of military glory, leading to their capture, and the loss of their winter uniforms and boots. In the event, Weary dies of gangrene in the train en route to the POW camp; he blames Billy in his dying words.

Paul Lazzaro

Another POW. A sickly, ill-tempered car thief from Cicero, Illinois, who takes Weary's dying words as a revenge commission to kill Billy. He keeps a mental enemies list, claiming he can have anyone "killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses."

Kilgore Trout

A failed science fiction writer who manages newspaper delivery boys, and has received only one fan letter. After Billy meets him in a back alley in Ilium, New York, he invites Trout to his wedding anniversary celebration. There, Kilgore follows Billy, thinking he has seen a time window. That incident is triggered, not by Billy's time traveling, but by a repressed war memory. Kilgore Trout is also a main character in Vonnegut's novel "Breakfast of Champions".

Edgar Derby

A middle-aged man who has pulled strings to be able to fight in the war. He was a high school teacher who felt that he couldn't just let his young students go off to war without also fighting himself. He is a fellow POW to Billy and Paul Lazzaro, and the only one who stands up to Howard W. Campbell Jr. and defends American ideals. Though he appears to be unimportant throughout most of the book, he seems to be the only American before the bombing of Dresden to understand what such war can do to people. German forces summarily execute him for looting a teapot after the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Though it seems not to be the most pivotal death in the book, Vonnegut declares that this death is the climax of the book as a whole.

Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

An American Nazi; before the War, he lived in Germany as a successful, famous, German-language playwright, and became a Nazi propagandist. In an essay, he connects the misery of American poverty to the disheveled appearance and behaviour of the American POWs. Edgar Derby confronts and challenges him when he tries recruiting American POWs into the American Free Corps to fight the Communist Russians on behalf of the Nazis. He is the protagonist of Mother Night, an earlier Vonnegut novel.

Valencia Merble

Billy's obese wife, and mother of their two children, Robert and Barbara; he is emotionally distant from her. She dies from carbon monoxide poisoning after an automobile accident en route to the hospital attending Billy after his airplane crash.

Robert Pilgrim

Son of Billy and Valencia; a troubled, middle-class boy, and disappointing son, who so absorbs the whitebread culture's anti-Communist world view, he metamorphoses from pampered, suburban adolescent rebel to hardcore Green Beret soldier.

Barbara Pilgrim

Daughter of Billy and Valencia. She is a "bitchy flibbertigibbet", from having had to assume the family's leadership at the age of twenty. She has "legs like an Edwardian grand piano," marries an optometrist, and treats her widower father as a childish invalid.

Tralfamadorians

The extraterrestrial race who appear (to humans) like upright toilet plungers with a hand atop, in which is set a single, green eye. They abduct Billy and teach him about time's relation to the world as a fourth dimension, fate, and death's indiscriminate nature. Throughout the novel it is hinted that the Tralfamadorians may not really exist.^{[citation needed]}

Montana Wildhack

A pornographic model who stars in a film shown in a pornographic bookstore when Billy stops by to check out the Kilgore Trout novels sitting in the window. She is also abducted and placed in Billy's habitat on Tralfamadore, where they have sex and produce a child.

"Wild Bob"

A superannuated Army officer Billy met in the war; he is delirious and eventually dies of a fever. He tells the POWs to call him "Wild Bob"; he thinks them his command, the 451st Infantry Regiment; "if you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, ask for Wild Bob," is an inspirational phrase of his that Billy repeats to himself.

Eliot Rosewater

A friend of Billy Pilgrim who introduces him to science fiction novels while he is in the mental hospital. Rosewater, like Billy, has experienced a horrifying event from the war. The smart Rosewater and Pilgrim together create a fantasy universe built around the Kilgore Trout Novels they read that helps them get through the grief of World War II. Eliot Rosewater also shows up in other books by Kurt Vonnegut.

Bertram Copeland Rumfoord

a Harvard history professor, retired Air Force brigadier general, and millionaire, who shares a hospital room with Billy and is interested in the Dresden bombing. He is almost surely a relative of Winston Niles Rumfoord, a character in a previous novel by Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan.

The Scouts

Two American infantry scouts trapped behind German lines who found Roland and, later on, Billy. Although Roland considers himself and the scouts to be best friends and heroes (calling their group the "Three Musketeers"), the scouts are uncomfortable around him and later reveal that Roland is slowing them down as much as Billy, and abandon them both. Later on it is discovered that they were killed in a skirmish with German troops while going back to Allied territory. So it goes.