Major Works Data Sheet
Title: Slaughterhouse Five
Biographical information about the author
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Date of Publication: March 1969
Genre: Fiction, Time travel, Black Humor, Anti-War
Novel, Philosophy, Science Fiction, Speculative
Fiction
Historical information about period of publication
Slaughterhouse-Five speaks of the firebombing of
Dresden in World War II, and refers to the Battle of
the Bulge, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights
protests in American cities during the 1960s. Billy's
wife, Valencia, wears a Reagan for President!
bumper sticker on her car, referring to Reagan's
failed 1968 Republican presidential nomination
campaign. The bumper sticker was edited out of a
broadcast version of the film which aired on at least
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11,
1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of a
successful architect, Kurt Sr., and his wife, Edith
Sophia. Vonnegut was raised along with his
sister, Alice, and brother Bernard (whom he spoke
of frequently in his works). Fourth-generation
Germans, the children were never exposed to
their heritage because of the anti-German
attitudes that had spread throughout the United
States after World War I (1914–18; a war in which
many European countries, some Middle Eastern
nations, Russia, and the United States fought
against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey).
Because of the Great Depression (the severe
economic downturn in the 1930s), the Vonneguts
lost most of their wealth and the household was
never the same. Vonnegut's father fell into severe
depression and his mother died after overdosing
on sleeping pills the night before Mother's Day.
This attainment and loss of the "American Dream"
would become the theme of many of Vonnegut's
writings.
one cable channel during or after the Reagan
administration. Another bumper sticker is mentioned
that says "Impeach Earl Warren."
The slaughterhouse in which Billy Pilgrim and the
other POWs are kept is also a real building in
Dresden. Vonnegut was beaten and imprisoned in
this building during World War II and it is because of
the meat locker in the building's basement that he
(and Billy) survived the fire-bombing; the site is
largely intact and protected. One can visit it and take
a two-hour guided tour called "Kurt Vonnegut Tour".
Vonnegut in World War II
He was sent as a POW to Dresden. On February
13, 1945, British and American bombers
destroyed the city by dropping high explosives
followed by incendiary bombs. The resulting
firestorm turned the non-militarized city into an
inferno that killed up to 60,000 civilians. Vonnegut
and his fellow POWs survived by accident only
because they were housed some 60 feet
underground in a former meat locker and
slaughterhouse.
Vonnegut’s job for weeks after the bombing was
to gather up and burn the remains of the dead.
His experience at Dresden marked him for life and
eventually resulted in his literary masterpiece,
Slaughterhouse-Five.
Characteristics of the genre:
Slaughterhouse-Five is a anti-war science fiction book
with elements of dark comedy and meta-fiction. Kurt
Vonnegut uses the characteristics of this genre to
successfully write a famous and controversial novel.
The book is an autobiography of Kurt Vonnegut’s life
following the firebombing of Dresden, with Billy
symbolically representing all the characters that
Vonnegut came across during World War II. He also
uses Billy to explain the events that he cannot. Since
Billy, like Vonnegut is unable to describe the
horrendous events that had occured, science fiction
was used to present a fictional, utopian place where
Billy could recall the war. That is why he can describe
the war better to Montana Wildhack in the
Tralfamadorian zoo than to his wife on their
honeymoon. The novel is also filled with dark humour
to illustrate the funny, yet cruel nature of war, the most
famous example being “So it goes”, which is repeated
106 times. Interestingly, Vonnegut drew attention in
the first and last chapters to the fact that
Slaughterhouse-Five is indeed a book, traits typical to a
20th century “postmodern” metafictional book. This in
part was to make us understand that we stare at reality
and yet treat a something distant, not related to us.
Plot summary
Billy Pilgrim is born in 1922 and grows up in Ilium, New York. A funny-looking, weak youth, he does
reasonably well in high school, enrolls in night classes at the Ilium School of Optometry, and is drafted into
the army during World War II. He trains as a chaplain’s assistant in South Carolina, where an umpire
officiates during practice battles and announces who survives and who dies before they all sit down to
lunch together. Billy’s father dies in a hunting accident shortly before Billy ships overseas to join an infantry
regiment in Luxembourg. Billy is thrown into the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and is immediately taken
prisoner behind German lines. Just before his capture, he experiences his first incident of time—shifting:
he sees his entire life, from beginning to end, in one sweep.
Billy is transported in a crowded railway boxcar to a prisoner’s camp in Germany. Upon his arrival, he and
the other privates are treated to a feast by a group of fellow prisoners, who are English officers who were
captured earlier in the war. Billy suffers a breakdown and gets a shot of morphine that sends him time
traveling again. Soon he and the other Americans travel onward to the beautiful city of Dresden, still
relatively untouched by wartime privation. Here the prisoners must work for their keep at various labors,
including the manufacture of a nutritional malt syrup. Their camp occupies a former slaughterhouse,
which was named Slaughterhouse Five in English. One night, Allied forces carpet bomb the city, then
drop incendiary bombs to create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen into the blaze, asphyxiating or
incinerating roughly 130,000 people. Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight meat locker. They
emerge to find a moonscape of destruction, where they are forced to excavate corpses from the rubble.
Several days later, Russian forces capture the city, and Billy’s involvement in the war ends.
Billy returns to Ilium and finishes optometry school. He gets engaged to Valencia Merble, the obese
daughter of the school’s founder. After a nervous breakdown, Billy commits himself to a veterans’ hospital
and receives shock treatments. During his stay in the mental ward, a fellow patient named Eliot
Rosewater introduces Billy to the science fiction novels of a writer named Kilgore Trout. After his
recuperation, Billy gets married. His wealthy father-in-law sets him up in the optometry business, and Billy
and Valencia raise two children and grow rich. Billy acquires the trappings of the suburban American
dream: a Cadillac, a stately home with modern appliances, a bejeweled wife, and the presidency of the
Lions Club. He is not aware of keeping any secrets from himself, but at his eighteenth wedding
anniversary party, the sight of a barbershop quartet makes him break down because it triggers a
memory of Dresden.
The night after his daughter’s wedding in 1967, as he later reveals on a radio talk show, Billy is
kidnapped by two-foot-high aliens who resemble upside-down toilet plungers, who he says are called
Tralfamadorians. They take him in their flying saucer to the planet Tralfamadore, where they mate him
with a movie actress named Montana Wildhack. She, like Billy, has been brought from Earth to live under
a transparent dome in a zoo where Tralfamadorians can observe extraterrestrial curiosities. The
Tralfamadorians explain to Billy their perception of time, how its entire sweep exists for them
simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When someone dies, that person is simply dead at a particular
time. Somewhere else and at a different time he or she is alive and well. Tralfamadorians prefer to look at
life’s better moments.
When he returns to Earth, Billy initially says nothing of his experiences. In 1968, he gets on a chartered
plane to go to an optometry conference in Montreal. The plane crashes into a mountain, and, among the
optometrists, only Billy survives. A brain surgeon operates on him in a Vermont hospital. On her way to
visit him there, Valencia dies of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning after crashing her car. Billy’s
daughter places him under the care of a nurse back home in Ilium. But he feels that the time is ripe to tell
the world what he has learned. Billy has foreseen this moment while time-tripping, and he knows that his
message will eventually be accepted. He sneaks off to New York City, where he goes on a radio talk
show. Shortly thereafter, he writes a letter to the local paper. His daughter is at her wit’s end and does
not know what to do with him. Billy makes a tape recording of his account of his death, which he predicts
will occur in 1976 after Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by the Chinese. He knows exactly how it will
happen: a vengeful man, named Paul Lazzaro he knew in the war will hire someone to shoot him. Billy
adds that he will experience the violet hum of death and then will skip back to some other point in his life.
At the end Vonnegut emphasizes that life is a meaningless limerick, so Billy hears the bird still asking the
same meaningless question, “Poo-tee-weet?”
Describe the author’s style
Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five in a
dark, stark tone. This is evident from Vonnegut’s
constant poking at the nature of war. When Pilgrim
met the Tralfamadorians, they told him that their
chapters were like telegrams; to convey the plot and
nothing else. Vonnegut takes a similar approach
and keeps his chapters short, and straightforward.
At the same time, Vonnegut applies dark humour to
the story, mainly by the apathetic reactions of Billy,
and the irony that is present in every paragraph of
the book;
"I think the climax of the book will be the
execution of poor old Edgar Derby," I said.
"The irony is so great. A whole city gets
burned down, and thousands and thousands
of people are killed. And then this one
American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins
for taking a teapot. And he's given a regular
trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad.
Thus Slaughterhouse Five is a dark, ironic, and yet
apathetic book written in a manner that made this
book one of Vonnegut’s and America’s most
famous anti-war novels.
Examples that demonstrate style
The novel's writing is minimalist and dry, and
Vonnegut tends to write in short, declarative
sentences. Each tiny section is dense with dialogue
and action. For example, check out Chapter 3,
Section 29 :
The war was nearly over. The locomotives
began to move east in late December. The
war would end in May. German prisons
everywhere were absolutely full, and there
was no longer any food for the prisoners to
eat, and no longer any fuel to keep them
warm. And yet – here came more prisoners.
(3.29.1)
This brief passage tells us (a) when the events of
this part of the book are taking place (late
December) and (b) what waits in the immediate
future (the end of the war). It also outlines the main
problems that Billy Pilgrim faces as a POW during
this part of the war: (a) there is no room for him in
German prisons, (b) there is no food for him to eat,
and (c) there is nothing to keep him warm.
Memorable quotations
1. “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.”
2. “So it goes.”
3. “‘It was like the moon,’ said Billy Pilgrim.”
4. “And what do the birds say? All there is to
say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-teeweet?’”
5. “He has seen his birth and death many
times...”
6. “Mustard gas and roses.”
7. “Blue and Ivory.”
8. “‘Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in
the amber of this moment. There is no
why.’”
Significance of quotations
1. -shows that Billy doesn’t believe in the
Tralfamadorians’ concept of time.
been mentioned in reality and in
Tralfamadore which proves that his
Tralfmadorian experiences are made up
2. -follows every mention of death
repetition points out the inevitability of
death
3. -describes Dresden and Billy’s feelings Billy felt isolated that he imagined himself
on the surface of the moon.
4. -symbolizes lack of anything intelligent to
say about war.
5. -death is not something to fear, but not
living an active and positive life is.
6. -repetition demonstrates that no part of this
story is isolated from another. -shows that
war (mustard gas) can destroy anything
beautiful (roses)
7. -symbolizes the fragility of the thin
membrane between life and death
8. -demonstrates the Tralfmadorians’ concept
of time and free will
-time is an
illusion
-free will does not
exist.
Significance of opening scene
The opening scene of Slaughterhouse
Significance of closing scene
The closing scene of Slaughterhouse Five is Billy
Five is Kurt Vonnegut stating that all of
Pilgrim and his group emerging from their stable to find
the events in the book did happen. The
that World War II was over. In a tree a bird looked
significance of this is that what is read is
down on Billy Pilgrim and said, “Poo-tee-weet?” This
all true and should be thought of as such.
goes back to the lack of anything intelligent to say about
He says, “All this happened, more or less.
war. By saying nothing, in this case, the author is saying
The war parts, anyway, are pretty much
everything that can possibly be said.
true.”
Symbols
Setting
The Bird Who Says “Poo-tee-weet?”
intelligent to say about war. Birdsong rings out
Germany, 1944-45; "Ilium,"
upstate New York
alone in the silence after a massacre, and “Poo-
The setting of Slaughterhouse-Five is wide-ranging, but
tee-weet?” seems about as appropriate a thing to
the two most important places are Germany during
say as any, since no words can really describe
World War II and "Ilium," the fictional town in upstate
the horror of the Dresden firebombing. The bird
New York where Billy Pilgrim lives most of his life.
The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of anything
sings outside of Billy’s hospital window and again
in the last line of the book, asking a question for
which we have no answer, just as we have no
answer for how such an atrocity as the
firebombing could happen.
The Colors Blue and Ivory
In Germany Billy undergoes the painful experiences of
captivity and violence that cause him to start skipping
through time. And it's the narrator/author's real-life time
in Dresden, Germany, that provokes him to write
Slaughterhouse-Five in the first place. In Chapter 1, the
narrator tells us that he and his wife spent some time
On various occasions in Slaughterhouse-Five,
after the war in Schenectady, New York, which Billy
Billy’s bare feet are described as being blue and
Pilgrim's "Ilium" seems to be based on. The parallels
ivory, as when Billy writes a letter in his basement
in the cold and when he waits for the flying saucer
to kidnap him. These cold, corpselike hues
between the narrator and Billy's wartime and postwar
experiences add to the sense that Slaughterhouse-Five,
for all of its aliens and time travel, is a largely
autobiographical novel.
suggest the fragility of the thin membrane
between life and death, between worldly and
otherworldly experience.
Another recurring setting throughout the novel is the
hospital. Billy spends his first night in the POW camp in
The Horses
the hospital, where he meets Edgar Derby doped up on
morphine. When Billy has his breakdown and checks
After the bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim and
himself into a veteran's hospital after the war, he meets
several POWs return to the slaughterhouse to
fellow veteran Eliot Rosewater and discovers the
pick up souvenirs. Two German doctors approach
science-fiction novels that will help him escape from his
him and scold him for the condition of his horses.
awful life for the next 30 years. And when Billy is
The animals are desperately thirsty, and in their
recovering from his plane crash in a hospital in Vermont
travel across the ashy rubble of Dresden, their
in 1968, he first begins saying the name "Tralfamadore"
hooves have cracked and broken so that every
aloud.
step is agony. The horses are nearly mad with
pain. Billy weeps for the first and last time during
the war at the sight of these poor, abused animals
(9.19-20).
These three scenes of recovery strongly associate
hospitals with relief. At the same time, these moments
of rest from the stresses and memories that are driving
him crazy are only temporary. Once Billy leaves the
This is the only time in the whole book that Billy
hospital, he always loses control again: his release from
cries, so this scene is very significant. There is a
the prison hospital allows him to be shipped to Dresden;
parallels between the horses' suffering and Billy's
his departure from the veteran's hospital leads to his
own seem striking. These horses have no way of
marriage with Valencia and the start of his dreary life as
understanding the destruction around them, nor
an optometrist; and his escape from the Vermont
the orders being given to them. With no way of
protesting their treatment, they obediently keep
walking through the ruins of Dresden even though
every step on the sharp rocks damages their
hospital sends him directly into conflict with his
daughter, Barbara. While Vonnegut seems to represent
the work that doctors do positively, medicine is still not
enough to heal Billy of all that ails him. For that, the
entire world would need to change.
hooves. Like Billy himself, the animals are
innocent victims of great suffering without ever
Old AP Questions
understanding why.
Prayer of Serenity
Montana Wildhack wears a locket on which is
written, "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 same words appear framed on
Billy's optometry office wall.·
First, the prayer
appears in both Billy's real life and his
Tralfamadorian life, strongly hinting that his
Tralfamadorian experiences are made up. He has
taken bits and pieces from things he has seen in
his daily life and read in science fiction novels to
make up a world he wants to live in.
·
Second, this prayer expresses something
profound that Billy is really looking for. He does
want to find a way to accept what he cannot
change (the past), the courage to change what he
can (his current reality), and the wisdom to tell the
difference.
So It Goes
·
The phrase “So it goes” follows every
mention of death in the novel, equalizing all of
Possible themes / Topics of discussion
1. Fate and free will
Theme: It is said to be an illusion and Billy uses
that explanation to escape from reality. In this
theme, Vonnegut shows that individuals are free
to choose but their decisions cannot change some
inevitabilities.
-Topics
of Discussion: Does Billy Pilgrim exercise his
own will at any point in the novel? If so, when?
2. Warfare
-Theme:
This book is about privates, most of whom don’t
want to be on the battlefield. It’s about men who
have been deprived of any kind of control on
what they do and where they go.
-Topics of Discussion: Why does
Slaughterhouse Five avoid any direct
representations of the battlefield and instead
focus on people who are not fighting even
though it’s a book about World War II?
3. Time
-Theme:
Billy is tossed back and forth in time with no
control over where he will be from one moment
to the next. His only cure was to take refuge in
the beliefs of the Tralfmadorians.
-Topics of Discussion: How does the
Tralfmadorian idea of time appear to affect the
very structure of Slaughterhouse Five?
4. Suffering
Theme: Much of the suffering in the book seems
to target innocents. The injustice of sufferingthat it strikes those who seem least equipped to
them, whether they are natural, accidental, or
intentional, and whether they occur on a massive
scale or on a very personal one.The phrase
reflects a kind of comfort in the Tralfamadorian
idea that although a person may be dead in a
particular moment, he or she is alive in all the
other moments of his or her life, which coexist and
can be visited over and over through time travel. It
tells that death has non meaning or emotion.
Sight
·
Billy is an Optometrist. Billy’s Job is to find
different lenses to help his patients see clearly the
world around them. ·
Billy/Vonnegut present
the reader with different lenses in order to correct
the nearsightedness of the world. Shows the
mistakes and the problems in society.
deal with it- is another reason Billy turns to
science fiction and Tralmadore to make himself
a new reality. -Topics of Discussion: Why
does Vonnegut spend time on the suffering of
animals?
5. Morality and Ethics
Theme: Moral lessons were shunned since the
Tralfmadorians made it clear that there novels
had no moral lessons since you can’t change the
future anyway. Vonnegut seems to be asking his
readers to do instead is to think about how much
human suffering the war brought for both sides.
Some of the most evil characters in the book are
the most self-assured and that is what leads to
war in the first place.
Topics of Discussion: Is there moments in the
novel where Billy can intervene morally but
doesn’t? Why not?
Characters
Name
Role in story
Significance
Adjectives
Billy Pilgrim
Kurt Vonnegut
Bernard O’Hare
-Main Character
-Protagonist
-Minor Character
-Also the author of the novel
- fellow POW with Billy
Pilgrim
Mary O’Hare
-Wife of Bernard O’Hare
-Believes that the book
Slaughterhouse Five will be
a heroic war story which will
make her children go to war.
So she wants the book to be
named The Children’s
Crusades
Tralfamadorians
-Toilet plunger shaped
aliens
-Can see in 4 Dimensions
-Take away Billy Pilgrim
during his daughter’s
wedding day
His fragmented experience of
time structures the novel as short
episodic vignettes and shows
how the difficulty of recounting
traumatic experiences can require
unusual literary techniques.
Vonnegut’s commentary as a
character and an author enables
a more factual interpretation of a
story that seems almost
preternaturally fictional and adds
support to the idea that such
fantastical elements may be the
reality of a traumatized mind.
-O’Hare, a nonfictional character,
helps ground SlaughterhouseFive in reality. Vonnegut actually
has this other survivor of the
firebombing contribute to the
research and recollection process
involved in creating the book,
which allows us to take the
novelistic details as fact and
appreciate the thoughtful manner
in which they are presented.
-O’Hare and Vonnegut not
remembering the details from the
bombing emphasize the theme of
destructiveness of war.
-Mary hates war, and Vonnegut’s
decision to dedicate the novel in
part to Mary suggests how deeply
he agrees with her that the ugly
truth about war must be told.
The Tralfamadorians’
philosophies of time and death
influence the narrative style of the
novel. They perceive time as an
assemblage of moments existing
simultaneously rather than as a
linear progression, and the
episodic nature of
Slaughterhouse-Five reflects this
notion of time. Their acceptance
mild-mannered
everyman
nice
adaptive
flexible
-knowledgeable
-wise
-friendly
-chilly
-knowledgeable
-understanding
of death, which Billy embraces,
leads the narrator to remark
simply “So it goes” at each
mention of death.
-Campbell represents all that is
wrong with war; he desires to use
people for his beliefs.
Howard W
Campbell Jr
-An American who has
become a Nazi. Campbell
speaks to the prisoners in
the slaughterhouse and tries
to recruit them for “The Free
American Corps,” a German
army unit that he is forming
to fight the Russians.
Werner Gluck
-German Slaughterhouse
Guard
-Young Soldier
-wild
-evil
-inflexible
-disloyal
-betrayer
-Gluck gets his first glimpse of a
naked woman along with Billy.
Their shared intrigue and interest
in the naked female body unites
these two men from different
sides (America and Germany),
reflecting how fundamentally
human feelings—such as lust—
can make differences in people
fall.
-energetic
-Represents how everyone in war
is just trying to be a war hero.
Roland Weary
Eliot Rosewater
-A soldier taken prisoner by
the Germans along with
Billy. Unlike Billy, who is
totally out of place in the
war, Weary is a deluded
glory-seeker who fancies
himself part of the Three
Musketeers and saves
Billy’s life out of a desire to
be heroic.
-A war veteran who
occupies the bed near Billy
in the mental ward of a
veterans’ hospital. Like Billy,
Rosewater is suffering from
the aftereffects of war, and
he finds escape—and helps
Billy find escape—in the
science-fiction novels of
Kilgore Trout.
-wild
-stupid
-cruel
-psychotic
-Signifies how war affects
everyone in different ways.
-crazy
-book-lover
-Following the firebombing, Derby
is sentenced to die by firing
Edgar Derby
Wild Bob
Valencia Merble
Bertram Copeland
Rumfoord
Lily Rumfoord
Robert Pilgrim
Barbara Pilgrim
-Another survivor of
Dresden’s incineration.
-Too old to be a soldier
-An army colonel in the
German rail yard who has
lost his mind. Wild Bob asks
if Billy belongs to his
regiment when, in fact, all
his men are dead.
-Wife of Billy Pilgrim
-Fat and obese, died by
accidental carbon monoxide
poisoning
-A Harvard history professor
and the official U.S. Air
Force historian who is laid
up by a skiing accident in
the same Vermont hospital
as Billy after his plane
crash.
-Rumfoord’s young trophy
wife and research assistant.
-Lily Rumfoord is frightened
of Billy.
-Billy’s son, who is a failure
and a delinquent at school,
though he cleans up his life
enough to become a Green
Beret in the Vietnam War.
-Billy’s daughter, newly
married at the age of
twenty-one, who is faced
with the sudden death of her
mother and the apparent
mental breakdown of her
father.
squad for plundering a teapot
from the wreckage.
-His death is anticlimactic, since
Billy does not view it with any
sense of pathos (emotional
appeal) , but rather as something
that was inevitable.
-He invites everyone to visit him
in Wyoming, but his unpredictable
death shows how the war makes
such gestures both poignant and
pointless.
- Billy did not want to marry her
but he had to due to his ethics
and morals.
-Signifies how not many people
know about the bombing of
Dresden through how Rumfoord
changes the subject everytime he
speaks of it.
-She lies silent in the next bed as
a symbol of the scope of
powerlessness and lack of free
will.
-Robert’s presence in the story
during Billy’s later life helps
illustrate the pervasiveness of
Billy’s war trauma, especially his
inability to communicate and
relate to his own son. Robert’s
successful self-reformation from
delinquency to discipline (in
Vietnam) seems to indicate
Vonnegut’s acceptance of the
inevitability of war.
-Barbara represents the follow-up
generation to the one ravaged by
World War II. While Billy’s ability
to function in life and be
successful in a career paves the
way for Barbara’s development,
his war trauma and delusions
constantly frustrate her. This
signifies how future generations
don’t care about the bad stuff,
-old
-suspicious
-wild
-stupid
-hopeful
-over confident
-fat
-gullible
-stupid
-loving
-annoying
-disrespectful
-quiet
-respectful
-no self confidence
-wild
-free from rules
-rebellious
-annoying
-filled with
frustration
-care free
-uncaring
-irresponsible
-disrespectful
they only prefer to hear all the
good stuff.
Billy’s Mother
Billy’s Father
-Billy’s mother is described
as a woman “trying to
construct a life that made
sense from things she found
in gift shops” (she once
hung a grisly crucifix in
Billy’s room but never joined
a church because she
couldn’t settle on a place of
worship).
-Billy’s father throws young
Billy into the YMCA pool to
teach him how to swim. Billy
prefers the bottom of the
pool, but he is rescued
unwillingly from drowning
after he loses
consciousness.
- Signifies how war makes people
so different that it’s hard for them
to even face their own family,
because war has drastically
changed them.
-This also relates to how
countries can not settle on an
idea which results in them going
to war.
-This incident initiates the novel’s
theme of the illusory nature of
free will. An idea humans believe
to be true but the Tralfamadorians
decline.
-annoying
-hyperactive
-wild
-crazy
-psychopath
-uncaring
-careless
-stupid
-self-righteous
-patriachal