Slaughterhouse−Five
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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Table of Contents
1. Slaughterhouse−Five: Introduction
2. Overview
3. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Biography
4. One−Page Summary
5. Summary and Analysis
6. Quizzes
7. Themes
8. Style
9. Historical Context
10. Critical Overview
11. Character Analysis
12. Essays and Criticism
13. Suggested Essay Topics
14. Sample Essay Outlines
15. Compare and Contrast
16. Topics for Further Study
17. Media Adaptations
18. What Do I Read Next?
19. Bibliography and Further Reading
20. Copyright
Slaughterhouse−Five
1
Introduction
In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was not especially well known or commercially successful, despite having already
published five novels and two short story collections. The publication of Slaughterhouse−Five in that year
marked Vonnegut's artistic and commercial breakthrough. Based on Vonnegut's own experiences as a World
War II prisoner who witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, Slaughterhouse−Five is the
story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has come "unstuck in time." Without any forewarning, he finds himself
suddenly transported to other points in time in his own past or future. In chronicling the extraordinary events
that happen to Billy, from witnessing the Dresden firebombing to being kidnapped by aliens,
Slaughterhouse−Five summarizes many of the themes of Vonnegut's work. These include the dangers of
unchecked technology, the limitations of human action in a seemingly random and meaningless universe, and
the need for people, adrift in an indifferent world, to treat one another with kindness and decency. Almost
thirty years after its initial publication, Slaughterhouse−Five remains Vonnegut's most discussed and widely
admired novel.
» Back to Table of Contents
Overview
The Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born on November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father was a prominent
architect and his mother the daughter of a wealthy brewer. They were liberal, atheistic, and well−to−do third
generation Germans who were prominent in the social scene of their city.
Although Vonnegut’s older brother and sister were both educated in private schools, the Depression caused
such a dramatic drop in the family income that the Vonneguts could no longer afford such luxuries as
continuing to pay for Vonnegut’s education. The change was traumatic for Vonnegut’s parents and eventually
led to his mother Edith’s suicide in 1944. Vonnegut adjusted well to public school, where he started writing as
a reporter for the newspaper at Shortridge High School.
Vonnegut enrolled in Cornell in 1941. At his father’s recommendation that he study something practical,
Vonnegut majored in chemistry. He continued to write, eventually becoming editor of the student paper at
Cornell University.
In 1942, Vonnegut enlisted in the army. He was captured by Germans on December 22, 1944, after the Battle
of the Bulge. From the front he was eventually sent to the open city of Dresden. While he was there, the Allies
firebombed the city, killing 130,000 people. (By comparison, about half that number died in the bombing of
Hiroshima.) Vonnegut survived only because his prison was a meat locker 60 feet underground.
After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he would have three children. He briefly
attended the University of Chicago, then moved to Schenectady, New York, where he worked as a publicist
for General Electric. During this time Vonnegut began to sell stories to such publications as Collier’s and the
Saturday Evening Post. Encouraged by his successes, he left his position at G.E. to pursue writing full−time in
1950.
Vonnegut’s first full−length novel was Player Piano, published in 1951. His next novel, Sirens of Titan, was
not published until 1959. Although this may have been the least successful part of his career, he did manage to
support his family, including three nephews adopted when his sister died, from the earnings brought in by the
short stories he wrote during this period.
Introduction
2
Vonnegut’s next book was Mother Night (1961), which was followed rapidly by Cat’s Cradle (1963) and God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). Vonnegut turned to teaching in 1965, eventually coming to the University
of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. While there, he was offered a three book contract, which was followed in short
order by a Guggenheim fellowship. These fortuitous events led to the writing of Slaughterhouse−Five, which
was published in 1969.
Slaughterhouse−Five was a success both critically and financially. Since its publication, Vonnegut has
pursued writing full−time, producing eight more novels and many other works. His most recently published
work is 1995’s Timequake.
Historical Background
World War II started in September, 1939, when Germany invaded a heavily resisting Poland. France and
Great Britain, which had signed an alliance with Poland, had been attempting to restrain Nazi aggression
through diplomatic measures, but the invasion forced them to declare war. Meanwhile, the United States,
which was in an isolationist mood carried over from World War I, declared itself neutral.
Because of its discipline, organization, and firepower, Germany was very successful and quickly overran the
Poles. The Allies were able to do little against the German juggernaut, in great deal
because of the outdated nature of their armies. While they had chosen to rest on their victor’s laurels, the
Germans had aggressively modernized their army, devoting special resources to their air force. This led to the
development of the dive bomber, which flew at low altitude to hit enemy targets, and aircrafts capable of
flying for longer distances, permitting the bombing of targets far behind enemy lines.
These resources came to bear in the Battle of Great Britain (1940−1941), which was conducted almost
entirely in the air. German forces bombed military targets, but Great Britain’s extensive radar network limited
their effectiveness, and there were few casualties. Not until Britain sent a force to bomb Berlin did Hitler aim
the German aircraft at civilian targets in Britain. Fortunately, the Germans refused to launch a land−based
invasion and turned their attention instead toward the U.S.S.R..
While the United States covertly aided the British throughout this period, it was not until the bombing of Pearl
Harbor in December of 1941 that the United States officially entered the war. At this time, Great Britain was
only hanging on, and France had long fallen. Britain, the United States, and the U.S.S.R. spent much time
strategizing, deciding to pursue war on other fronts before tackling the Germans on the continent.
In early 1944, the Allies pursued a campaign of air warfare against the Germans that was designed not only to
take out military and industrial targets but to sap the will of the people by attacking civilian sites. Incendiary
bombing played a significant role in these raids, leading to a great loss of life. Then, in June of 1944, after the
fall of Mussolini, the Allies invaded German−occupied France through Normandy. The quick Allied victories
as the Nazis were routed from France came as a surprise, and the Allies did not pursue their advantage as well
as they might have. However, as the German forces were pushed behind their own borders, they began to
resist more strongly. By November, the two sides had come to a stalemate.
In this interim, the German forces regrouped. Hitler called for Total Mobilization, forcing every able bodied
male between 16 and 60 into the army. These reserve forces allowed the Germans to surprise the Allied forces
in the Battle of the Bulge, which took place in weakly defended Ardenne hills on December 14, 1944. Kurt
Vonnegut was involved in this battle, which resulted in the death of 120,000 Germans and 75,000 Americans.
It was the last great German offensive action.
In preparation for the invasion of Germany, the Allies intensified their aerial bombardment of Germany in
early 1945. The culmination of these attacks was the levelling of refugee−swollen Dresden on February
13−14, 1945, an attack which was led by the British forces. While the Allies claimed Dresden was an
Introduction
3
important communication and transportation hub, there is now little doubt that its destruction served no
military purpose, especially since the Dresden railyard was damaged so little that it was functioning again
within three days. At a loss estimated at 130,000 civilian lives, most of whom died as a result of a firestorm
that reached 1000 degrees Fahrenheit rather than the bombing itself, the casualties exceeded those of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is the overlooked tragedy that Vonnegut records in Slaughterhouse−Five .
Germany collapsed in the spring of 1945, as the Allies pushed in from the west and the Soviets from the east.
After Hitler committed suicide, his successor surrendered on May 8, 1945, ending the war in Europe. In a few
more months, Japan too surrendered, but the face of the world and of warfare would never be the same.
Kurt Vonnegut’s wartime experiences provide the grist for the formative, and most relevant, life experiences
of Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut’s participation in the war took place at a historical cusp. The Battle of the Bulge,
in which he fought, was the only time the Germans had the kind of radical successes against American forces
that would allow them to take prisoners. Hitler’s last gasp, the
Total Mobilization, is reflected in Billy/Vonnegut’s description of the German soldiers who capture them, a
motley group containing a poorly−shod and dressed teenager as well as two extremely old men.
The hostility of the Germans toward the Russians, who by the time of Billy/Vonnegut’s capture had killed
over a million German soldiers, is epitomized by Billy’s eerie encounter with a starving, yet still very much
human, Russian prisoner of war. Within the text, this episode contrasts strongly with the depiction of the
British prisoners, who seem to benefit from the same positive attitude that kept Hitler seeking a British
surrender instead of British annihilation. They are fit and healthy, while the Russians are dying from hunger
and the cold. It would have been difficult for Vonnegut not to notice the difference even if he did not know
the reason for it.
The developments in warfare also strongly affected Vonnegut’s experience. The use of firebombing was only
made possible by the invention of longer−range aircraft. The strategy of attacking
civilian targets (ostensibly for “demoralization”) was also quite novel. (As noted, the German forces
themselves aimed only for military targets until the British initiated the practice against
Berlin. German civilians suffered far more heavily as a result of this “tactic” than the British, who were
protected by their coastal radar
network.)
The Germans also had not prepared for firestorms resulting from incendiary bombing, as the effect had only
been discovered a short time before in Hamburg. Without numerous deeply−dug bomb shelters, there was no
way for such a large population to escape the killing effects of high heat and oxygen depletion. The
development of long−range bombers, the decision to firebomb
civilians, and the lack of an effective warning system or shelter were all responsible for the destruction of
Dresden and the slaughter of its unsuspecting populace. Oddly, Vonnegut’s meat locker prisoner, which
would doubtlessly been repulsive to the Dresden populace, preserved him from the firestorm’s effects.
It is worthwhile to note that the personalized narrative Vonnegut is able to provide this event is itself original,
or at least it was at the time the book was published. After the end of World War II, the Dresden catastrophe
was swept under the rug. Military histories avoided its mention and official information on the incident was
classified long beyond any reasonable time. The only possible explanation for this “oversight” is the one cited
at the end of Slaughterhouse−Five by a military hawk: the “true story” upsets anyone with a conscience. Even
the British attempted to retreat from their “accomplishment,” realizing that the bombing of a defenseless
population of civilians inhabiting one of the most beautiful cities in Europe had almost no support among their
own people.
Introduction
4
For a long time the pretense was held that the city was of some military importance; but as
Slaughterhouse−Five reminds the reader over and over, this simply was not true. And as David Irving
documents in his seminal The Destruction of Dresden, the railyards were completely missed, while the
historical center of the city was turned into a kiln that baked human beings into little bricks. The reason for the
bombing seems to descend into a combination of gross callousness and the desire to get revenge on the
Germans. Noteworthily, the raid on Dresden took place long before the concentration camps came to light.
Irving’s book was also inspirational to Vonnegut, as it was the first fully−researched documentation of the
attack on Dresden, its causes and its aftermath. It makes clear the innocent situation of the Dresdeners, who,
although short on food, felt safe thanks to Dresden’s status as an “open city.” This same belief led the city’s
leaders to not consider heavy−duty bomb shelters a priority. Finally, the myth of Dresden’s safety made is a
magnet for refugees fleeing the Russian advance. Unfortunately, these mistakes resulted in even more deaths
when the city was finally attacked.
Yet the Destruction of Dresden maintains a detached air, even in its descriptions of basements filled to wading
depth with human gore and water tanks loaded with boiled corpses. Hiroshima was truly a tragedy, but few
people know that more people died in the Dresden firestorm (and in fire−bombed Tokyo) than in the wake of
the Enola−Gay. Slaughterhouse−Five is often the first time an American will ever have heard of these events.
It was up to Vonnegut to bring this tragedy to the notice of the world in a way no one could forget, and in a
way that could only ring so true with his own experiences behind it.
Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse−Five during the Vietnam war years. Protests against the war were numerous,
but the feeling of inevitable victory ran high in many quarters. Simultaneous with the national debate over the
war, the 1960s were marked by advances and setbacks in American race relations. The civil rights movement
had had many successes, but there had also been rioting in some cities.
Before Vonnegut finished Slaughterhouse−Five, both Robert Kennedy, hero of the anti−war movement, and
Martin Luther King would be dead. Their deaths started a loss of optimism in American life that would
receive its coup de grace in the Seventies from Watergate and the miltary fiasco in Vietnam.
The 1960s were a pivotal era in the advancement of the fictional form. Black humor met with great success
during this time. Most notable among its practitioners was Joseph Heller, author of Catch−22. Black humor
acknowledged the absurdity of the world’s workings, making this absurdity a matter for laughter. Man’s
inability to affect his fate was accepted as the status quo.
Vonnegut was categorized as a black humorist for some time, along with such outstanding authors as Terry
Southern and John Barth. It was not a dishonorable characterization, but rather limiting to the critical analysis
of his work. Much worse was his earlier label of science fiction author, a result of the futuristic setting of his
first two novels, the dystopian Player Piano and the space opera parody Sirens of Titan. Such a description
ignored his short story work and pigeonholed Vonnegut as a participant in a genre generally considered to
have no literary value. This one−dimensional tag was likely the cause of Vonnegut’s failure to be included on
Esquire’s mid−fifties list of “every living American writer of even the slightest merit,” an oversight which
bothered him for years.
Despite the brilliance of his work of the early sixties (especially Cat’s Cradle), the turgid prose of Player
Piano and the fantastic setting of Sirens of Titans dogged Vonnegut’s reputation into these years. However,
among the reading public, his books were selling well enough during this time to merit their reprinting in
1966. He had became increasingly popular among college students, thanks in part to the word of mouth that
had led to Sirens of Titan selling for fifty dollars a copy during the years it was out of print.
Introduction
5
The first scholarly article to be published on Vonnegut finally appeared in 1966. But Vonnegut’s battle to be
taken seriously was far from over. Now, however, his popularity, which skyrocketed with the publication of
Slaughterhouse−Five, and his vernacular style were used as weapons against him. One critic, Stanley Schatt,
criticized his novels as “simplistic philosophy of kindness packaged in sophomoric tales that catered to the
whims of unsophisticated readers.” While his popularity enabled Vonnegut to devote himself once again to
writing full time, critics still found it difficult to believe that a writer could appeal to the masses and still be
good.
Despite the doubts of some contemporary critics,Slaughterhouse−Five was the work that sealed Vonnegut’s
reputation as one of the best authors of the modern age. Nineteen seventy−one became the banner year for
academic criticism of Vonnegut, and 1972 saw the first book devoted entirely to Vonnegut’s writings .
The analyses of Vonnegut’s works have improved as he has aged. Recent titles have tackled such topics as the
psychological states of his characters and the paradigm of Eden within his books. Yet, as late as 1989, Robert
Merril, editor of Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, asked for Vonnegut to be “taken more seriously by more
critics.
The difficulty of this hinges on the fact of Vonnegut’s continued output, which makes every analysis of his
opus contingent on his next piece. Yet time will doubtlessly be kind to him, because his works are of lasting
merit. One can only wish him to continue to keep critics of his works pleading
contingency by continuing to write more of them.
Master List of Characters
Bernard V. O’Hare—Vonnegut’s fellow American prisoner of war and peacetime friend; He accompanies
Vonnegut on his return back to Dresden.
Mary O’ Hare—Bernard’s pacifist wife; She accuses Vonnegut of planning to glamorize war.
Billy Pilgrim—The time−travelling protagonist; He primarily
varies between being a chaplain’s assistant taken prisoner of war by the Germans and between his later life as
a successful
optometrist.
Barbara Pilgrim—Billy’s daughter; She is worried that her father has lost his mind.
Tralfamadorians—According to Billy, creatures from outer space who can see in the fourth dimension (time)
and who kidnaps Billy.
Roland Weary—A cruel American soldier; He is thrown together with Billy and two scouts after the Battle of
the Bulge.
Billy’s mom (no name given)—A sad, quiet woman who tries to make meaning in her life out of things
purchased in gift shops.
Paul Lazzaro—A rabid little American soldier who has sworn to make Billy Pilgrim pay for the death of
Roland Weary’s.
Edgar Derby—A middle−aged American school teacher who will be shot in Dresden for stealing a teapot; He
is kind to Billy.
Introduction
6
Eliot Rosewater—A patient next to in Billy in the mental ward; He introduces Billy to the works of Kilgore
Trout.
Valencia Merble—Billy’s fiancee, and later wife; She is overweight and materialistic.
Montana Wildhack—Star of stag movies and Billy’s mate in the Tralfamadorian zoo.
Howard W. Campbell, Jr.—An American Nazi propagandist who tries to recruit American P.O.W.s into the
“Free American Corps.”
Kilgore Trout—A reclusive science fiction author; He becomes friends with Billy.
Maggie White—A beautiful, if simple woman married to one of Billy’s fellow optometrists.
Robert Pilgrim—Billy’s son, a Green Beret fighting in Vietnam.
Bertram Copeland Rumfoord—A history professor in the hospital with Billy; He refuses to believe Billy was
in Dresden.
Lily Rumfoord—Rumfoord’s trophy wife.
Wild Bob—A colonel whose regiment has been destroyed, causing his mind to snap. His rantings at the
German railyard disturb Billy.
Summary of the Novel
Chapter One is a preface−like chapter in the novel. Vonnegut describes the difficulty of writing
Slaughterhouse−Five. Although he felt his war experiences needed to be written, he feels the finished product
is a failure.
Billy Pilgrim travels in time. Most of his travels revolve around his experiences as a prisoner of war in World
War II. Because he is a time traveller, he always knows what the outcome of each
experience will be.
Billy, who was recently in a plane crash, is eager to tell the world about the wisdom of the planet
Tralfamadore, whose residents kidnapped him. While his daughter berates him, he travels to his war
experiences. After a major battle, Billy is hiding behind enemy lines with three other soldiers. One of them is
Roland Weary, who is about to beat Billy, when they are captured by the Germans.
On his march to the railyards, Billy time travels to his optometry office in Ilium. He listens to a speech at the
Lion’s club in favor of blanket bombing in Vietnam, then goes home for a nap. He returns to World War Two.
At the railyards, the prisoners are loaded onto boxcars for transportation to the prison camps.
Next Billy time travels to the moment when the Tralfamadorian spaceship kidnapped him, then returns to the
boxcar. Roland Weary is dead when the prisoners arrive at the German prison camp. After a few days there,
during which time Billy time travels to the mental ward where he stayed after the war, his death, the
Tralfamadorian zoo, and his wedding night, the Americans are sent to Dresden.
The Americans are housed in an abandoned slaughteryard in Dresden. Billy relives the plane crash and his
rescue. Back in Dresden, he and his friend, Edgar Derby, work at a malt syrup factory.
Introduction
7
During an air raid, Billy travels to his seventeenth wedding anniversary party, where a barbershop quartet
dredges up a suppressed memory of the bombing of Dresden. He then goes to the zoo on Tralfamadore, where
he tells his beautiful mate, Montana, about his memory. After the flames of Dresden have died down, the
prisoners and their guards leave the gutted city in search of food and shelter, finally staying at an inn outside
of the city.
Billy’s wife, Valencia, dies on her way to see him in the hospital after the plane accident. Because of his
silence after the crash, he is considered a vegetable. He finally speaks to Bertram Rumfoord, telling him that
he was in Dresden when it was bombed, and that the Tralfamadorians had taught him that the destruction of
Dresden had to be. After being discharged, Billy sneaks off to New York and gets on a radio show, where he
talks about the Tralfamadorians. Vonnegut says that he hopes Billy’s philosophy is wrong.
Billy is put to work digging the corpses out of the rubble. Edgar Derby is shot for looting a teapot. One day,
the war is finally over. Billy walks free into the springtime world.
Estimated Reading Time
Slaughterhouse−Five is a simply written and short book. It should take about seven hours to read the entire
work. After doing so, it would be good for the student to reread the book to facilitate comprehension of
Vonnegut’s style.
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Author Biography
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Kurt and Edith (Lieber)
Vonnegut. Vonnegut's father was a successful architect, and his mother's family ran an equally successful
brewery. However, the onset of Prohibition, followed by the Great Depression, as well as anti−German
sentiment in the wake of World War I, put the Vonnegut family under severe economic and social distress. As
an undergraduate at Cornell, Vonnegut wrote articles for the school newspaper opposing American entry into
World War II. After Pearl Harbor, however. Vonnegut put aside his reservations about the war and joined the
U.S. Army in January, 1943. World War II saw his family's fortunes sink even lower, leading to his mother's
suicide in May, 1944. Vonnegut was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. In February, 1945, while in
a German prison camp, he witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden, an experience which later became an
important part of his novel Slaughterhouse−Five.
After being liberated by Soviet troops in April. 1945, Vonnegul returned to the United Stales and was
awarded the Purple Heart. He married Jane Cox in September of that year and enrolled in the graduate
program in anthropology at the University of Chicago. His master's thesis was rejected, however, and in 1947
Vonnegut moved to Sche−nectady. New York, where he went to work as a public relations writer for the
General Electric Research Laboratory. His experiences at General Electric also found their way into his
fiction, most notably his first novel, Player Piano (1952). While working for GE, Vonnegut was also writing
fiction. After publishing several short stories and his first novel, he resigned from the company in 1951 and
moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to become a full−time writer.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, Vonnegut published several novels and numerous short stories. Novels such as
The Sirens of Titan (1959), Cat's Cradle (1963), and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) increased his
reputation from that of a little−known author of science fiction to an "underground" favorite with a small but
loyal audience. After God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater appeared, Vonnegut taught at the prestigious Iowa
Writers' Workshop, an experience which encouraged him to be more innovative and autobiographical in his
Author Biography
8
writing. The result was Slaughterhouse−Five, the publication of which marked the beginning of Vonnegut's
widespread fame.
Although Vonnegut's works of the 1970s received uneven critical response, his popularity continued to grow.
In 1971, having separated from his wife, he moved to New York City. In that same year, the University of
Chicago accepted Cat's Cradle in lieu of a thesis paper and finally awarded Vonnegut his master's degree in
anthropology. In 1979, he married photographer Jill Krementz. During the 1970s and 1980s Vonnegut
continued to produce novels, such as Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick (1976), Jailbird (1979), and
Galapagos (1985), as well as various essays and articles collected in Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons
(1974) and Palm Sunday (1981), and a play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970). Through the 1980s and
into the 1990s, Vonnegut has achieved a level of fame unusual for an American writer. As a commentator on
social issues and an outspoken opponent of censorship and militarism, he continues to be not merely a
well−known novelist, but a significant figure in American culture.
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One−page Summary
Part I: Introduction
Slaughterhouse−Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has come "unstuck in time." At any point in
his life, he may find himself suddenly at another point in his past or future. Billy's experiences as an American
prisoner of war in Germany during World War II are told in more or less chronological order, but these events
are continually interrupted by Billy's travels to various other times in his life.
At several points in the novel, including the whole of Chapter One, Vonnegut addresses the reader directly. In
the opening chapter, the author mentions his own real−life experiences as a prisoner of war—in particular, his
witnessing of the Allied firebombing of the German city of Dresden—and discusses the difficulties he had
over the years in writing about his war experiences. He also tells of his visit with Bernard O'Hare, who was a
prisoner along with Vonnegut, and of their trip back to Germany. When O'Hare's wife learns that Vonnegut is
planning to write a book about he war, she becomes angry, thinking that Vonnegut will glamorize the war.
The author promises her that he will not and that he will call his book "The Children's Crusade."
Part II − Billy Pilgrim in the War
Chapter Two begins Billy Pilgrim's story. Born in Ilium, New York, in 1922, Billy is drafted into the Army
during World War II. Assigned to the post of chaplin's assistant, Billy is sent overseas to Europe, where, in
1944, his regiment is all but destroyed during the Battle of the Bulge. The only survivors are Billy, two
experienced scouts, and Roland Weary, a sadistic bully whose hobbies include collecting instruments of
torture. The other three soldiers are reasonably well−clad and armed, but Billy has "no helmet, no overcoat, no
weapon, and no boots." While wandering with the other three soldiers, Billy has his first experience of being
"unstuck in time," travelling in quick succession to several points in his past and future before returning to
1944.
Eventually, the two scouts desert Billy and Roland, for which Roland blames Billy. The two are quickly
captured by a band of German soldiers who have ambushed and killed the two scouts. They are then
transported to a prison camp aboard a horribly overcrowded train. Several prisoners die along the way,
including Roland Weary, who has contracted gangrene. Before he dies, Weary blames Billy for his death and
asks the other soldiers to avenge him.
After ten days on the train, Billy and the other prisoners arrive at a prison camp originally used to exterminate
One−page Summary
9
Russian prisoners. After being processed into the camp, the Americans are enthusiastically greeted by the
British prisoners, who have been in the camp for over four years. While the Americans are in terrible shape
physically and emotionally, the British have kept themselves in excellent condition. Appalled at the sorry state
of the Americans, the British offer them food and clothing, and even entertain them with a play of Cinderella.
The Americans are made sick by the rich food. Billy, who is in even worse shape than many of the others,
falls into an hysterical fit during the play and has to be restrained and tranquilized. He is taken to the prison
hospital, where he meets Paul Lazzaro, who had befriended Roland Weary on the prison train and promised
Weary that he would one day kill Billy as an act of revenge.
The American prisoners are transferred to the German city of Dresden, an "open city" with no strategic value
that is supposed to be safe from attack. They are housed in an abandoned
slaughterhouse—Slaughterhouse−Five. At one point they are visited by Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an
American who has gone over to the Nazis. When Campbell tries to talk the prisoners into switching sides, he
is roundly condemned by Edgar Derby, a forty−four−year−old schoolteacher who has nursed Billy in the
prison hospital and who is by now the unofficial leader of the American prisoners.
One night, while the Americans are underground in the slaughterhouse meat locker, Dresden is firebombed by
the Allies, who have chosen to attack the city despite its lack of military significance. When the soldiers return
to the surface the next morning, they find the entire city has been destroyed and almost all its inhabitants have
been killed:
The guards told the Americans to form in ranks of four, which they did. Then they had them
march back to the hog barn which had been their home. Its walls still stood, but its windows
and roof were gone, and there was nothing inside but ashes and dollops of melted glass. It
was realized then that there was no food or water, and that the survivors, if they were going to
continue to survive, were going to have to climb over curve after curve on the face of the
moon.
Which they did.
The curves were smooth only when seen from a distance. The people climbing them had
learned that they were treacherous, jagged things—hot to the touch, often unstable—eager,
should certain important rocks be disturbed, to tumble some more, to form lower, more solid
curves.
Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to
say. One thing was clear. Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead,
regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the
design. There were to be no moon men at all. 135,000 civilians are killed in the raid, almost
twice the number who would later die at Hiroshima.
The German guards who had been in the meat locker with the Americans march the prisoners to a suburb,
where they are taken in by a blind innkeeper and housed in a stable. The Americans are then taken back into
Dresden and forced to dig through the ruins for bodies. Edgar Derby, after being caught taking a teapot from
the ruins, is executed by a firing squad. Eventually, however, the war in Europe ends, and Billy and the
surviving prisoners return home.
Part III − Billy Back Home
Back in Ilium, Billy resumes classes at the Ilium School of Optometry, where he had been a student before the
war. During his senior year, he becomes engaged to Valencia Merble, the wealthy daughter of the owner of
the optometry school. Shortly after his engagement, Billy suffers "a mild nervous collapse," checks himself
One−page Summary
10
into a veteran's hospital near Lake Placid, and undergoes electroshock therapy. Six months after leaving the
hospital and graduating from optometry school, he marries Valencia.
Billy's life from this point on is one of unexpected material prosperity, as his father−in−law sets him up in a
lucrative optometry practice. He and Valencia have two children, Barbara and Robert. However, Billy
continues to come "unstuck in time," periodically and without warning, a condition he does not discuss with
anyone.
Part IV − Billy on Tralfamadore
In 1967, on his daughter's wedding night, Billy is kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. The
aliens take him back to their home planet and display him naked in a cage. After being on display for some
time, Billy is joined by Montana Wildhack, a movie actress. They become lovers and have a child together.
Finally, Billy is returned to Earth, while Montana stays behind to take care of their child. When Billy returns,
it is only a moment after he left. He has not even been missed.
While on Tralfamadore, Billy learns of the aliens' philosophy of time and death. For Tralfamadorians, time is
not a linear progression of events, but a constant condition: "All moments, past, present, and future, always
have existed, always will exist." Like Billy, the aliens can travel back and forth to different moments in time.
They do not consider death a significant event, since when a person dies he or she "is still very much alive in
the past." The Tralfamadorians advise Billy "to concentrate on the happy moments of life, and to ignore the
unhappy ones."
Part V − Billy Back on Earth
At first, Billy does not tell anyone of his kidnapping. A year later, however, while on a chartered flight to an
optometrists' convention, his plane crashes, and everyone on board is killed except for Billy and the copilot.
Valencia, desperately trying to get to the hospital to see Billy, is killed in an auto accident.
After his release from the hospital, Billy returns home, but soon travels to New York, where he shows up at a
radio talk show and, mistaken for someone else, is allowed to go on the air. He tells the story of his captivity
on Tralfamadore and is "gently expelled" from the studio. Billy's daughter Barbara and her husband come to
New York and take Billy home, after which he begins to write letters to newspapers telling of his experiences
with aliens.
Billy dies on February 13,1976—the anniversary of the Dresden bombing. He is gunned down by an assassin
hired by Paul Lazzaro, who is still alive and has never forgotten his promise to kill Billy. However, Billy the
time traveller "has seen his own death many times" and is unconcerned. After the shooting, Billy "experiences
death for a while" and then "swings back into life again" at a point in 1945, "an hour after his life was
threatened by Lazzaro." Billy, like the Tralfamadorians, regards death with a shrug and a "So it goes." There
will always be another moment.
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Summary and Analysis
1. Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis
2. Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis
3. Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
4. Chapter 4 Summary and Analysis
5. Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis
Summary and Analysis
11
6. Chapters 6−7 Summary and Analysis
7. Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis
8. Chapters 9−10 Summary and Analysis
Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis
New Characters:
Kurt Vonnegut: the author and occasional narrator
Bernard V. O’Hare: Vonnegut’s fellow American prisoner of war
Mary O’ Hare: Bernard’s pacifist wife
Summary
Vonnegut begins what is otherwise a work of fiction with some straightforward commentary from the author.
Before the fiction begins in Chapter Two, Vonnegut announces that most of
Slaughterhouse−Five is based in truth. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden near the end of World War II,
and while he was there he witnessed its firebombing by the Allied Forces. He returned to Dresden in 1967,
with his friend, Bernard O’Hare, in preparation for writing this book.
Vonnegut says that it has been very difficult for him to write about the destruction of Dresden. He worked on
his Dresden book for years, coming back to it again and again. He was told that there was no purpose in his
writing a book that would essentially be anti−war, since wars were about as inevitable as glaciers.
Vonnegut initially contacted his friend, Bernard O’Hare, to ask for help in remembering the war. O’Hare said
he didn’t remember much and was generally unenthusiastic. Vonnegut told him that he thought the climax of
his book would be when Edgar Derby was shot for stealing a teapot, a situation which Vonnegut found
tremendously ironic.
In his attempts to write this book, Vonnegut had attempted to outline its plot. His favorite outline was one
done in crayon on the back of a roll of wallpaper. The end of this outline was the exchange of soldiers
between the American and the Russian forces. At this point, O’Hare and Vonnegut, and the American who
inspired the character Paul Lazarro, were all sent back to a rest camp in France before their return to the
States.
Vonnegut then talks about his life after the war. He studied anthropology for a while at the University of
Chicago, during which time he worked as a police reporter. In those days, neither Vonnegut nor most other
Americans knew that the air raid on Dresden had been more destructive than the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima. When Vonnegut described his planned book to a professor, the professor reminded Vonnegut of
the German atrocities against the Jews. Vonnegut could only inadequately respond that he was aware.
Vonnegut then went to Schenectady, New York, where he worked in public relations for General Electric.
Vonnegut describes this period in his life as the scrawny years. He and his wives were friends with many
other veterans in Schenectady. Vonnegut notes that the kindest of the veterans they knew there were the ones
who had really fought during World War II. These men were also the ones who truly hated war. Vonnegut
attempted to do some research on Dresden while in Schenectady, but the Air Force refused to release the
information he asked for on the grounds that it was secret.
Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis
12
Around 1964, Vonnegut finally went to visit Bernard O’Hare. Although they sat around for a while, they were
unable to recall any good stories about the war. Meanwhile, Vonnegut was disconcerted by the unexplained
hostility of Bernard’s wife, Mary. Finally, Mary accused Vonnegut of planning to write a book which would
glorify war, thereby promoting death. Vonnegut promised her he wouldn’t, adding that he would call his book
“The Children’s Crusade.”
Vonnegut went on to teach at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. During this time, he was given a
contract to write three books. Slaughterhouse−Five is the first of these books. Vonnegut apologizes to the
man who gave him the contract for the shortness and disorganization of his book. He explains that there
simply isn’t much intelligent to say about a massacre.
Vonnegut then remembers the night he spent in a hotel before he left for Dresden. He had two books with
him: one, a book of poetry, and the other a biography of the French writer Celine. Vonnegut picks up the
Gideon Bible and reads of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Even though Lot’s wife was turned to a
pillar of salt for looking back at the burning cities, Vonnegut loves her for being so human. He is no longer
going to look back after finishing Slaughterhouse−Five.
He then tells the reader that his book is a failure. He ends the chapter by quoting the opening and closing lines
of the fictional sections of Slaughterhouse−Five.
Analysis
In this preface−like first chapter, Vonnegut details the difficult process of writing about his war time
experiences in Dresden. He does not say specifically what has caused him to have so much trouble writing his
“Dresden book,” but he does give many clues as to why almost a quarter of a century passed before he finally
produced Slaughterhouse−Five.
First, Vonnegut’s intent was not to glorify his experience. By choosing to write an anti−war book, he left
himself with no strong models to follow. (Joseph Heller’s infamous Catch−22, which also dealt with the
randomness and misery of war, preceded Slaughterhouse−Five by a mere eight years.) As Mary O’Hare
bitterly notes, war has generally been portrayed as a noble enterprise. Yet, like the other kind veterans
Vonnegut met in Schenectady, Vonnegut knows this is not so. For this reason, his attempt to portray the
events which he experienced would need to be written in a new style, one which Vonnegut himself created
within this book.
Second, in dealing with the events surrounding the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut has to manage the
ignorance he and most other people have on the topic. This ignorance was fostered by the United States
military’s decision not to release information on the bombing for a considerable time after the end of the war.
While a lack of factual information may have delayed Vonnegut’s production of his own account of this
event, the general lack of public
awareness provided Vonnegut with the opportunity to shock his audience in a way that could not be easily
done with a better−known topic.
Yet underneath all of this must lie a deeper reason for Vonnegut’s “Dresden book” paralysis. Although he
does not mention it in the novel, during the time when he was supposedly working on his Dresden novel, he
completed five other books and a plethora of short stories. What was it that kept driving him back to the event,
like the man in the limerick Vonnegut quotes, yet kept his thoughts in an unproductive loop? Why didn’t
Vonnegut just turn his back to Dresden, like Lot and his daughters did at Sodom and Gomorrah?
Vonnegut’s obsession indicates the indelibility of the horrors he witnessed in the aftermath of the bombing of
Dresden. The images he will describe in the rest of the book with such dispassion were so upsetting that
Vonnegut could not escape them. Such circularity and paralysis seem to indicate that he was suffering from
Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis
13
post−traumatic stress syndrome. A less intelligent man might have snapped mentally; instead, Kurt Vonnegut
produced one of the masterpieces of modern literature.
While it might have been easier for Vonnegut to attempt to block his memories, he attempted instead to cope
with them through writing. The task must have been as onerous as Vonnegut describes it in this first chapter.
His humanistic sensibilities would neither let him glorify the events which he lived through, nor allow him to
justify them by dehumanizing the people who burned to death in Dresden as the evil enemy. Instead, he
needed to convey the message that all war is tragic.
By doing so, Vonnegut poisoned the reader with humanity as he felt all good writers should, according to
Jerome Klinkowitz’s work, Kurt Vonnegut. The reader should feel, as Vonnegut wishes his own children to
feel, “that the news of the massacre of enemies [does] not fill them with satisfaction or glee”. Thus, although
the protagonist of Slaughterhouse−Five has little response to the scenes he sees, Vonnegut’s own
interpretation of these events is quite clear and should inform the reader’s interpretation of Billy Pilgrim’s
experiences.
Vonnegut also introduces many of the themes and motifs of the novel in this chapter. For example, the
ambiguous phrase, “So it goes,” makes its first of many appearances after a mention of death. Time, the
organizing (or, rather, disorganizing) principle of the novel, comes to the fore when Vonnegut waits in his
Boston hotel room and the clocks behave srangely. In this book, described both death and time figure
strongly.
For the reader who does not have a knowledge of Latin and German, a few translations, borrowed from
Monica Loeb’s monograph on Slaughterhouse Five, will assist the understanding of this chapter. First, the
small Latin quote is adapted from Horace’s Odes. As Vonnegut uses it, the phrase means, “Ah, me, the
fleeting years are slipping by.” Second, the paragraph of Goethe quoted in the context of Mary Endell’s
Dresden, History, Stage, and Gallery, expresses Goethe’s “disgust at what the enemy has done to the
Frauenkirche in particular”. According to Monica Loeb’s work, Vonnegut’s Duty−Dance with Death: Theme
and Structure in Slaughterhouse−Five, the purpose of this selection is to remind the reader of the cycle of
destruction. It ties in strongly with Vonnegut’s reference in the conclusion of this chapter to the Biblical tale
of Sodom and Gomorrah. Dresden was not the first city to be utterly destroyed, with great loss of life: indeed,
the firebombing of Dresden was not even the first time Dresden had been flattened by enemy forces. The
question remains, of course, whether such destruction can be avoided.
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Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis
New Characters:
Billy Pilgrim: the time−travelling protagonist. He primarily varies between being a chaplain’s assistant taken
prisoner of war by the Germans and between his later life as a successful optometrist.
Barbara Pilgrim: Billy’s worried daughter
Tralfamadorians: according to Billy, creatures from outer space who can see in the fourth dimension (time)
Roland Weary: a cruel American soldier who travels with Billy after the Battle of the Bulge
Billy’s mom (no name given): in this chapter, a weak, old lady
Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis
14
Summary
Billy Pilgrim is introduced as an involuntary time traveller. After a youth spent in Ilium, New York, Billy is
sent to the battlefields of World War II in Europe. After the war, Billy finishes optical school, marries the
daughter of his school’s founder, and becomes a successful optometrist in Ilium. His grown daughter marries
another optometrist, while his juvenile delinquent son straightens out to become a Green Beret and fight in
Vietnam.
In 1968, Billy survives an airplane crash. His wife dies accidentally of carbon monoxide poisoning while he
was recuperating in the hospital. Back at home, Billy slips off to New York City, where he gets on a radio talk
show and announces that he had been kidnapped by space aliens from Tralfamadore, who kept him in a zoo
with his mate, the movie starlet Montana Wildhack. After being transported back to Ilium by his upset
daughter, Billy proceeds to further aggravate his family by writing a letter to the local newspaper describing
the Tralfamadorians in detail.
Billy is in the middle of writing his second letter to the paper. It describes the Tralfamadorian view of death,
which is strongly tied to the Tralfamadorian view of time. Billy wants to try to help the people of earth by
showing them how to see things the Tralfamadorian way. Billy’s daughter finds him in the basement and
berates him for making a fool of himself and his family.
The scene shifts to World War II, where Billy serves as a chaplain’s assistant. Billy is sent to Luxembourg in
December of 1944, where his regiment is destroyed in the Battle of the Bulge before Billy can even be
properly uniformed.
Billy joins a group of three Americans wandering behind the German lines. Two of the men are scouts; the
third is Roland Weary. Weary entertains himself by telling Billy about instruments and methods of torture,
including ones of his own invention. Weary, who is warm and has energy to spare, runs back and forth
between the scouts and Billy, pretending that he is in a war story.
Billy falls behind the group and has his first time−travelling experience, in which his father drops him into a
pool, and Billy sinks to the bottom. He then travels to 1965, where he visits his mother in a nursing home, and
to 1958, and 1961, where he passes out in the back of his car while looking for the steering wheel. He is
awakened by Weary banging him against a tree.
Weary forces Billy back to the scouts, who have determined that they are being pursued. While Billy
hallucinates, the scouts decide to ditch him and Weary. Weary is furious at Billy, whom he blames for the
breakup of the noble fighting unit to which Weary imagined he belonged. As Weary is preparing to kick Billy
in the spine, he realizes that he is being watched by a group of German soldiers and their dog.
Analysis
In the second chapter of Slaughterhouse−Five, the reader is finally introduced to the protagonist of the story,
Billy Pilgrim, and given a quick summary of his life. After this, the main thrust of the story might be expected
to be Billy’s conflicts with his daughter or his rise to success as a promoter of the Tralfamadorian way of life.
Yet, as this chapter shows, Vonnegut has not chosen to structure his novel around any expected form. The
most important moment of Billy’s life, the time he spent as a prisoner of war, will have more weight than
Billy’s life as an adult. Little time will be spent examining Billy’s activities after he writes his second letter
about the Tralfamadorians; rather, the narrative will travel widely over Billy’s adult experiences as a resident
of Ilium, New York.
Vonnegut, despite his self−characterization as a “trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization....and
suspense”—that is, as a novelist—makes no attempts to adhere to such conventions of the novelistic form as
Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis
15
building suspense. In Chapter One, Vonnegut announced the climax of the book will be the execution of
Edgar Derby. The next chapter starts by describing the important events of Billy’s life at the outset. Although
the book will later explore many of these events in detail, the reader already knows what the outcome of the
important events in Billy’s life will be. There is also little suspense as to what will happen to Billy in Dresden,
given the historical background Vonnegut provided in the first chapter.
This lack of suspense does, however, give a tremendous irony to the actions of the characters. In fact, the
predetermined outcome of their lives makes it appear that they have little control over their lives—that they
lack free will. The question of the existence of free will provides yet another theme of the novel, one which
will be explicitly explored in Billy’s encounters with the Tralfamadorians.
The traditional novel also naturalistically depicts a character’s movement through time. Each event depicted
in the novel follows one that proceeds it in time as well. Chapter Two casually ignores this conventional
structure of time. Instead of treating time in a “linear” fashion, one that moves from start to finish in a straight
line, Slaughterhouse−Five oscillates wildly between one moment in the protagonist’s life and another.
Billy’s life story is not difficult to follow, however. The links between events, often a sight or action that
mimics one Billyhas taken at some other period of his life, are similar to the connections that a reader makes
in his or her own mind to these sort of repetitions in real life. Vonnegut further aids the reader in reassembling
the actual time of these episodes by providing chronological signposts at many of the interchanges. These
usually take the place of references either to Billy’s age or to the actual year in which the event takes place.
As Monica Loeb details in Vonnegut’s Duty−Dance With Death, rather than linking events together by time,
Vonnegut has chosen to link them together through ideas and location. This is called the “‘spatialization of
time’.” The result is a highly fragmented narrative, composed, as it were, of “‘shrapnel bits’” that the reader
has to reassemble.
Billy’s being “unstuck in time,” as he is described at the beginning of chapter two, is the most stated
justification for the logic of this structure. Yet it is questionable whether or not Billy actually
is a time traveller because Billy’s judgement is itself questionable. Several textual elements combine to
undermine Billy’s credibility as a reliable interpreter of the novel’s world. First, the narrative itself frequently
indicates its doubt of Billy by inserting such phrases as “He says” (where it is set in its own paragraph for
further emphasis). This immediately makes the reader question Billy’s perception of reality.
Second, the description of the Tralfamadorians discredits Billy’s sanity. While he may believe that he has
been kidnapped by them, it is difficult to conceive of wise extraterrestrials shaped like plungers. The
description seems designed by Vonnegut to evoke a response of hilarity instead of suspending the reader’s
disbelief enough to accept the inclusion of aliens in the novel’s world. Finally, the moment when Billy’s time
travels initially occur, when he has apparently resigned himself to death in the chilly German forest, provides
a plausible explanation for Billy’s experiences: he is responding to a high−stress situation by escaping into a
fantasy world.
In light of the doubt created in the reader’s mind as to the actual nature of Billy’s so−called “time travel,” the
reader must search for an explanation of why Billy experiences life in this fashion. The banality of most of the
events of Billy’s life and the simplicity of the prose used to describe them make them appear to be “true”
within the context of the story. Since Billy appears to have lived a normal (stress−free) life since the war’s
end (and since the Tralfamadorians only provide Billy with “insights” into his condition), his spasticity must
have a purpose greater than providing an excuse for Slaughterhouse−Five’s disjointed narrative.
Given this fact, the reader should look further into what is causing Billy to travel through time. Its first
occurrence in Billy’s life seems unsurprising, given that he is fairly close to, and indeed ready for death. In
later life, when he has decided to spread the wisdom of Tralfamadore, he has just been in a plane crash that
Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis
16
left him with “a tremendous scar across the top of his skull,” and his daughter with fears of damage to his
brain. This, too, provides a plausible situation for Billy’s bizarre beliefs and actions.
Yet Billy also had a “nervous collapse” a few years after the war. Sandwiched in between the other events of
his life and given little attention in the narrative, Billy’s mental breakdown should alert the reader to the
unstable condition of his mind. What has caused it? What sets it off? While different interpretations are
possible, the most obvious cause for the disturbance of Billy’s mind must be the horrors he experienced and
witnessed as a prisoner of war. This throws a different light on Billy’s non−judgemental attitude toward his
experiences as a prisoner of war. His mind appears to have been damaged by these events. The question will
remain whether Billy ever regains his sanity, or if, indeed, his insanity provides him a point of view which is
saner than that of most people. The reader should carefully consider this question when attempting to
determine what the message of Slaughterhouse−Five is supposed to be.
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Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
New Character:
Wild Bob: a colonel whose regiment has been destroyed
Summary
After Weary and Billy are captured, they hear the shots of the guns that kill the scouts with whom they had
been travelling. Weary is relieved of his weapons, as well as his boots, and is given a pair of wooden clogs.
After taking a brief side trip to his optometry practice in 1967, Billy rejoins the prisoners being marched away
from the front. Billy returns to 1967, where he drives through the remains of Ilium’s burnt out ghetto
neighborhood. He listens to a Marine major give a speech in favor of increased bombings of North Vietnam at
a Lions Club meeting. He drives home for his afternoon nap, which he spends weeping quietly.
Billy opens his eyes to find it is the winter wind that is making them run. Weary, who is marching near him, is
also crying, but it is because his feet are being destroyed by his clogs. Billy marvels at the exciting scenery as
he walks along, spotting corpses, weapons of mass destruction, and shot−out farmhouses.
The prisoners finally arrive at the railyards. One of the colonels there, who is dying of pneumonia, asks
frantically for men from his annihilated regiment. In a delirium, he addresses Billy as if he were his entire
body of troops, inviting them all to visit Wild Bob in Cody, Wyoming. Weary is the only member of Wild
Bob’s regiment at the railyards, but he is in great pain and does not respond to Wild Bob’s calls. Vonnegut
adds that he and O’Hare were at the railyards.
The prisoners are loaded onto the boxcars according to their rank. A man dies in one of the boxcars. After
dawdling in their own luxuriously outfitted car, the guards go to fetch the corpse, which is Wild Bob.
The prisoners wait two days for their train to depart, taking turns sleeping on the floor and sharing food. Billy
falls asleep and time travels again to the night he was kidnapped by the Tralfama¬dorians.
Analysis
This chapter follows the two main threads of Billy’s life: his capture by the Germans and subsequent march to
the railyards with other prisoners of war, and his life as an optometrist in 1967.
Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
17
While Billy is obviously under stress as a prisoner, Billy’s adult life presents several anomalies that seem to
indicate a problem below the surface contentment. First, he falls asleep at work, even while examining
patients. This is possibly a sign of narcolepsy, a stress−triggered sleeping disorder. Second, Billy cannot make
himself care about things, whether it is the future of optometry in Europe or the destruction of North Vietnam
by bombing. Third, he is prone to unexplained crying fits. All of these problems indicate stifled emotions.
This combination of symptoms makes it seem doubtful that Billy has adjusted to civilian life as well as his
commercial success would indicate. Instead, he seems to be repressing some terrible secret, which requires
such tremendous effort to contain that it results in his emotional withdrawal from the world. Even Billy does
not know why he cries. It is a mystery for the reader to solve, one that seems likely to illuminate Billy’s flying
saucer journey.
Billy’s sanity during his experiences as a prisoner of war is highly questionable. His journey to the railyard is
marked by frequent trips through time, which occur even while Billy is involved in some other activity. He
also begins to see electric haloes around people’s heads. These signs of mental distress make Billy’s lack of
response to the death and destruction he sees seem less likely
to be caused by indifference than stress. In fact, his brain is scrambling Billy’s sensory input well enough for
him to greet abuse with laughter and smiles, and to welcome the sight of the guards’ home as heartily as that
of a bullet−riddened farmhouse. Since Billy has no control over the events around him (as epitomized in the
poem hung in his office), his brain seems to have decided to make every experience a pleasant one. The book
will later label this a Tralfamadorian way of dealing with life.
Among the many criticisms of Vonnegut’s writing is that his style is too simplistic. As William Allen says in
Understanding Kurt Vonnegut, “It is easy to view Vonnegut as the simplest of writers—one who offers his
readers short sentences, short paragraphs, cartoon−like characters, and lots of jokes”). Certainly it is true that
Vonnegut’s use of short paragraphs and incorporation of open space (and even drawings) makes it easy for the
eye to follow his words across the page. As previously noted, this audience−friendly style of writing
combined with Vonnegut’s sales figures to confirm to many academic critics that his novels lack serious
literary merit.
However, it must be observed that Vonnegut has made a conscious decision to write his novels in this fashion.
As he said in an oft−quoted interview, “I’m not inclined to play Henry Jamesian games because they’ll
exclude too many people from reading the book…I have made may books easy to read, punctuated carefully,
with lots of white space”. In another interview quoted in Loeb’s book, he said since the readers eyes don’t get
tired, “you get him [the reader] without him knowing it by making his job easy for him” Vonnegut wants his
novels to be accessible to the general public.
Furthermore, in this age of television, Vonnegut has accepted that people have shorter attention spans. For this
reason, his novels have generally been short, as well as frequently paragraphed. Additionally, Vonnegut has
rejected pretentiousness and chosen instead to use a naturalistic language in his work. This combination of
short, easy−to−read novels written in the vernacular has enabled Vonnegut’s books to, as stated in The
Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut, “retain the middle class audience to whom the novel genre originally
spoke”.
Why should all of this matter to a writer? The answer lies in yet another interview, this one found in The
Vonnegut Statement. In wondering why one should bother writing books when the people in power do not
read them, Vonnegut responded, as mentioned earlier in this text, that one must catch people who are still
open to ideas and “poison their minds with…humanity,” in order to “encourage them to make a better world”.
This statement should be kept in mind when attempting to determine the “moral” of Slaughterhouse−Five.
Vonnegut does not want people to give up like Billy and withdraw from the world; he wants them to take
actions to improve the world.
Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
18
In order to have any hope of having a positive effect on the world, Vonnegut must reach as many people as
possible. This is the underlying reason for his so−called “naive” style. Thus, despite the fact that
Slaughterhouse−Five ultimately challenges such notions as “the assumption of national innocence and
intrinsic American worth,” according to Klinkowitz, a philosophy which would repulse many readers, by
coating his subversive notions in a layer of accessibility and humor, Vonnegut has been able to get readers to
“swallow his sugar−coated pill”, according to Loeb, and take in his ideas.
Despite its overt simplicity, critics feel Slaughterhouse−Five certainly qualifies as being sophisticated”. First,
the very ordinariness of the text’s description of war scenes imbues them with more horror than complex
metaphors, which would more than likely draw attention away from the event and toward artistic device—and
its creator’s cleverness. Furthermore, the reader cannot help but wonder why Billy Pilgrim is not reacting
unfavorably to what he sees. He cannot possibly perceive so much death and destruction as commonplace.
Additionally, the banality of Vonnegut’s prose serves to further emphasize the banality of Billy’s existence.
The disconcerting effect this creates is to make Billy’s outer− (and inner−) space adventures seem as
commonplace as his time spent in the office, leaving the reader unsure if he is reading about reality or merely
a crazy man’s perception of reality. Thus, Vonnegut’s style serves to add further depth to his protagonist.
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Chapter 4 Summary and Analysis
New Characters:
Paul Lazzaro: a rabid American with a thirst for revenge
Edgar Derby: a kind, middle−aged American doomed to be shot for stealing a teapot
Summary
Billy is unable to sleep the night after his daughter’s wedding. He wanders around the house, knowing he is
about to be kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians. He watches a movie in reverse time, then imagines it
continuing from World War II all the way to Adam and Eve. After watching the movie in regular time, he
goes outside and enters the space ship.
Billy asks why he has been taken. A Tralfamadorian tells him that the moment just is, and that there is no
“why” to be asked. Billy is stuck like a bug in amber.
The acceleration of the Tralfamadorian ship sends Billy back to his boxcar. He wants to sleep, but his fellow
prisoners refuse to let him lie among them because he thrashes in his dreams.
No food is given to the prisoners as they are transported across Germany. In the car ahead of Billy’s, Roland
Weary dies of gangrene. He tells everyone on his car that he wants Billy to be punished for killing him.
The prisoners finally arrive in a converted extermination camp and leave their boxcars. Billy is given a
ridiculous overcoat.
In the camp, the prisoners are stripped prior to delousing. Among the men are Edgar Derby, who comforted
Weary as he died, and Paul Lazzaro, who promised Weary he’d get Billy Pilgrim.
The shower sends Billy back to a happy moment in his infancy. Then he travels to his middle age, where he is
playing a game of golf. In a moment of dizziness, he goes back to the spaceship, where he is strapped to a
Chapter 4 Summary and Analysis
19
contour chair. The spaceship is heading for a time warp.
A Tralfamadorian tells Billy that he is on the spaceship because that is the way things have to be. When Billy
asks if this means that the creature doesn’t believe in free will, the Tralfamadorian responds that across the
universe, only Earthlings believe in free will.
Analysis
This chapter follows young Billy up to his arrival in the prisoner−of−war camp in Germany, while
simultaneously recounting the events surrounding Billy’s kidnapping by the Tralfamadorians. In both of these
story lines, Billy is being held against his will by kindly jailors.
Lawrence Broer finds many other parallels between Billy’s experiences with the Tralfamadorians and his
memories of being a prisoner of war. For example, Billy himself finds that the buildings look the same.
Billy’s reception in both places is also similar; he is laughed at by Germans and Tralfamadorians alike. Later,
both of his prisons will be destroyed in an apocalyptic fashion. The primary difference between the two
scenarios is, according to Lawrence R. Broer, that “in the case of his Tralfamadorian fantasy, Billy himself
holds the keys to the locked doors of his mind”.
The argument for Billy’s flying saucer adventure being a delusion is great. The living situation in which he
describes there, that of being in a zoo with an Earth woman as his mate, parallels the plot of a science fiction
book he reads after the war. Furthermore, the woman who is chosen for his mate is a porn star—exactly the
kind of woman a man living in a sexless marriage might fantasize about living with. While in a New York sex
shop, Billy reads that his zoo mate Montana has disappeared and is presumed to be “wearing a cement
overcoat” in the bottom of a bay. This is a clear
example of reality intruding into Billy’s fantasy. The only argument in favor of Billy not being delusional is
his foreknowledge of his death; but as one critic put it, this could be a fantasy, too.
The main purpose of the existence of the Tralfamadorians in this novel (they previously appeared in Sirens of
Titan) is to introduce a new philosophy. The primary component of Tralfamadorian philosophy is their
understanding of time. Since they can see in four dimensions, they can view all moments in time
simultaneously, like a mountain range. (By comparison, the human concept of time will later be described as
that of a man strapped on a flatcar who sees the world flashing by through a tiny hole in a helmet.) With this
type of vision, the Tralfamadorians can choose what exact moments they wish to admire, and as they tell
Billy, they prefer to look at the good times.
This view of time has given the Tralfamadorians two other important beliefs. The first regards their view of
death. The Tralfamadorians do not see death as a tragedy. As explained by Billy in chapter two, the
Tralfamadorians believe a person only appears to die. Since Tralfamadorians can see all moments in time
simultaneously, they see the moments in time when a person is alive as well as the moments in which he is
dead. In this event, as in all others, they need only focus on the moments at which they enjoy looking. This is
why a Trafalmadorian can say “so it goes” at the mention of a person’s death: he can still enjoy the person
being alive.
The second Tralfamadorian belief that is of importance to the book regards free will. Simply put, the
Tralfamadorians do not believe that free will exists. People do what they have to in the ballet of time. All
actions are predetermined: we are like insects frozen in amber. The theme of free will—or, rather, its
non−existence in the life of Billy Pilgrim—runs subtly throughout Slaughterhouse−Five.
Why should free will be so important to this novel? The answer seems to hinge on its relationship to the
firebombing of Dresden. There was absolutely no strategic benefit to be gained from destroying Dresden. The
annihilation of such a beautiful city, in a manner guaranteed to result in massive, horrible civilian deaths
Chapter 4 Summary and Analysis
20
(more died there than in Hiroshima), can therefore only be explained as an act of free will.
The question that remains is what lesson Vonnegut wants the reader to learn about free will. This is a matter
of some debate among Vonnegut critics. The question is made more complex by the identification of
Vonnegut’s view, which appears in the first and last chapter, with that of either Billy Pilgrim or the narrator. It
has been said that Billy is Vonnegut, and they do share a well−documented similarity of appearance as well as
experience. It has also been claimed that Vonnegut’s view is identical to that of omniscient narrator of
chapters two through nine. This argument hinges on all of the chapters’ use of the Tralfama¬dorian phrase “so
it goes.”
Since the point of view of the narrative, with its “so it goes,” seems to be Tralfamadorian, and Billy’s attitude
is also Tralfama¬dorian, the conclusion would be that Vonnegut also does not believe in the existence of free
will. The lesson to be learned from Slaughterhouse−Five would therefore be not to be upset by the world’s
tragedies and to concentrate instead on the happy moments.
Yet while Billy may be aspiring to such a state of detachment, he still has his crying jags. While the
omniscient narrator may be unmoved by people’s deaths, Vonnegut, an active pacifist who remained horrified
by Dresden long enough to hold its memory into the 1960s, clearly is not. Vonnegut’s own opinion, and hence
that of the novel, cannot therefore be to adopt the Tralfamadorian philosophy explained so vividly in the book.
Billy, the shell−shocked soldier, needs the lies of Tralfamadore to deal with the innumerable deaths he has
witnessed and his own inability to control his life. His philosophy allows him to reach a state of bliss.
However such massacres will continue if people believe they are inevitable. While wars may actually be as
unstoppable as glaciers, to do nothing only encourages their proliferation. Adopting fatalism is not the lesson
to be learned from Slaughterhouse−Five.
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Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis
New Characters:
Eliot Rosewater: a patient next to Billy at the insane asylum
Valencia Merble: Billy’s fiancee, and later wife
Montana Wildhack: Billy’s mate in the Tralfamadorian zoo
Summary
Billy reads Valley of the Dolls while he is aboard the spaceship. His captor explains to him the curious
Tralfamadorian style of writing, which is like reading several telegrams at the same time.
Passing through a time warp sends Billy to two events on a family vacation in the West when he was twelve.
Then he goes back to the prison camp. The Americans are led to a bright shed, from which a troop of
Englishmen marches out to meet them. The Englishmen are in excellent shape. They have prepared a feast
and entertainment for their American guests.
After setting his coat on fire and shocking the British with his miserable condition (and ridiculous coat), Billy
watches a drag performance of Cinderella that makes him so hysterical he has to be carried out and given a
shot of morphine. He is watched over in the prison hospital by Edgar Derby, who reads to him from The Red
Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis
21
Badge of Courage.
Billy dreams, then time travels to 1948, where he is a patient at a mental ward in Lake Placid. In the bed next
to Billy’s is Eliot Rosewater, who also is finding life meaningless. Rosewater has brought with him his
beloved collection of science fiction books by Kilgore Trout. He has introduced Billy to them, and both of
them have been using science fiction to help them reinvent their lives.
Billy hides from his mother underneath the bedcovers. She talks instead to Rosewater, telling him that Billy is
engaged to a rich woman.
Billy wakes up in the prison hospital, where an Englishman is checking on him. He then returns to the asylum,
where his fiancée, Valencia, is now visiting him. Rosewater talks to them about the Trout book he is reading.
Billy then travels to the zoo on Tralfamadore. While in the zoo, Billy is told that the Tralfamadorians will one
day, accidentally, destroy the universe. The Tralfamadorians also tell Billy that they deal with such unpleasant
moments by not looking at them. Instead, they look at enjoyable things, like the zoo. They think it’s a
philosophy Earthlings would do well to follow.
Billy goes to his wedding night. Valencia tells him how happy she is, then tries to talk to him about the war.
Walking into the hotel bathroom, Billy comes back to the prison camp, where the Americans are sick with
diarrhea.
The next morning, Paul Lazzaro shows up in the hospital with a broken arm. A German major visits the
Englishmen there and reads to them from a monograph about the pitiful condition of American enlisted men.
Billy regains consciousness in Ilium, where his daughter is still lecturing him.
He then travels to the zoo, where Montana Wildhack has just arrived. Although she is initially terrified, she
grows to love Billy and they have delightful sex together. Billy wakes up in his bed in Ilium, where he
remembers his daughter taking him after she discovered the furnace was broken. He has had a wet dream
about Montana Wildhack.
The next day he goes back to his office for the first time since his trip to New York. His first patient is a boy
whose father has just been killed in Vietnam. Billy tries to share his Tralfamadorian
philosophy with the boy, whose mother tells the receptionist that Dr. Pilgrim is insane. His daughter comes
back to the office and takes him home.
Analysis
This chapter is full of insights into Billy’s character. Outstanding among the elements of his personality is
Billy’s lack of passion for life. He is a zombie, albeit a cheerful one. His existence is summed up in the words
of the English officer who says that it must be nice to feel nothing and still get full credit for being alive.
Billy’s view improves as he adopts the attitude of the Tralfamadorians, who only want to feel pleasant
emotions, as is shown by Billy’s chosen epitaph. Billy manages his mind so that he can go from merely
feeling nothing to seeing life as pleasant and empty of pain.
However, Billy’s commitment to an asylum after the war shows that Billy was hurt and needed help. Like
Rosewater, Billy suffers from the feeling that life is meaningless. Science fiction is supposedly helping Billy
with his problems. This would only leave him needing to be loved and accepted—the desires shown in his
giraffe dream—to be a truly happy man.
So why does Billy see marrying Valencia as a symptom of his insanity? Outwardly, it seems a means to
provide Billy with the love he wants. But since Billy does not love Valencia and is not even attracted to her,
Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis
22
the only reason he married her was to set himself up financially. By choosing money over love, Billy will
certainly be able to fit in to a materialistic society. He will then be able to create meaning in his life through
his possessions, at the expense of any possible emotional fulfillment.
In choosing this path, Billy shows that he has decided to deal with his troubles by running away from them.
Science fiction books are not providing him with psychological insights, but rather a way to escape the horror
of war and (later) the reality of his banal existence. Billy even refuses to air his war memories with his wife.
Billy remains a kind person, but his choice of a shallow life (and his lack of intellect) will not allow him to
deal with his war experiences in a therapeutic way. Ultimately, his subconscious’ attempt to resolve his inner
conflict will send him on a imaginary trip to another
galaxy.
A further intriguing layer of Slaughterhouse−Five is its inclusion of the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s other
novels. First, Billy himself is from Ilium, New York, the setting of Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first full−length
novel. (It is generally assumed that Ilium is meant to be Schenectady, where Vonnegut worked for General
Electric.) Second, many of the characters from Vonnegut’s earlier novels reappear in Slaughterhouse−Five.
Among them is Eliot Rosewater (of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater) and Howard Campbell (the protagonist of
Mother Night), as well as the time−travelling Tralfamadorians of Sirens of Titan. The cumulative, and
somewhat humorous, effect of these intrusions is to make Billy appear to be travelling through yet a third
fantasy: that of Vonnegut’s fiction.
More important to the novel is Vonnegut’s direct intrusion into the text. Both the omniscient narration of
Slaughterhouse−Five and the use of a fictional protagonist seem necessary devices for Vonnegut to manage
this subject. These devices allow Vonnegut to discuss his war experiences in a detached way. Vonnegut’s
clear identification of his own voice within the narrative establishes his existence as separate from it. His
intrusions also give more power to the narrative by reminding the reader that much of what this book
describes is not fiction but fact. This makes each quietly
depicted scene of war leap into high relief in the reader’s mind.
By switching back from third to first person, Vonnegut succeeds again in breaking the rules of the traditional
novel form. Vonnegut simply does not allow the reader to relax into the usual state of suspension of disbelief.
(This is the device which allows the reader to make sense of a “fiction” by telling himself that what he reads is
real within the context of the story). Instead, Vonnegut plays games with the concept of fiction. He tells the
reader that his story is “pretty much true,” but Billy’s adventures are clearly imaginary. At the same time, the
novel’s fantasy world intrudes into “reality” (in the autobiographical opening chapter) when the clocks in
Vonnegut’s hotel room begin to act strangely. Finally, Vonnegut interrupts the narrative by inserting himself
directly into the novel. The cumulative effect is that Vonnegut slaps the reader back into an awareness of the
nonexistence of the world which his mind has been inhabiting. This type of unconventional writing, which
gives “attention to its own artificiality,” is called “metafiction”, as explained in William Rodney Allen’s
piece, Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. It is a further sign that Vonnegut is anything but a writer of simple tales.
Finally, Vonnegut’s intrusion into his story invites a comparison between himself and his protagonist. Billy
and Vonnegut are both creators of fantasy. But Billy is a man of little imagination. His fantasies seem to have
arisen spontaneously from his subconscious mind in response to the tension of suppressing so many bad
memories. He uses his fantasies to escape his troubles. Vonnegut, who is obviously more intelligent than his
protagonist, has recast his troubles as fantasy in order to confront, and hopefully, subdue them. Denial might
have been the easier choice, but Vonnegut has chosen instead to turn the evils he has experienced into a lesson
for others.
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Chapter 5 Summary and Analysis
23
Chapters 6−7 Summary and Analysis
Summary
Billy returns, confused, to his German prison. He finds himself strangely drawn to his coat, which appears to
contain two small lumps within the lining.
The Englishman who broke Paul Lazarro’s arm returns to check on him. Lazarro says he is going to have him
killed someday. After the other man leaves, Lazarro tells Billy that he is going to have him killed after the
war, too.
Billy knows that his death is going to occur in 1976, after he gives a speech about Tralfamadore in Chicago.
At this time, Billy has become very popular. He is shot by a laser gun wielded by Paul Lazarro, who has been
hiding in the press box.
Billy comes back to life in 1945. He and his two companions leave the hospital and go into what used to be
the Englishmen’s theater. An Englishman tells the Americans they are going to be leaving the camp. They
will be sent to Dresden. Fortunately, they don’t need to worry about being bombed, because Dresden engages
in no significant war industries.
The Americans, feeling much better, leave for Dresden. They find the city amazingly beautiful. Vonnegut
says it looks like Oz. It is the only big city in Germany that has not suffered a bombing attack.
Billy, looking ridiculous, leads the parade of Americans into the town. He knows it is going to be bombed in
about a month. He is verbally abused by a German surgeon for his appearance. Billy wields the mysterious
contents of his coat at the man, which turn out to be dentures and a two carat diamond.
The Americans are taken to the mostly empty slaughterhouse that will be their new home. They will be
staying in the fifth building, which is called Slaughterhouse−Five.
Chapter Seven starts in 1970, as Billy boards a plane full of other optometrists. Billy knows it is going to
crash. As the plane flies along, Billy goes back to being slammed against a tree by Weary.
The plane crashes, killing everyone but Billy and the copilot. Billy’s skull is fractured. Thinking he is back in
World War II, he tells his rescuers to return him to Slaughterhouse−Five. He is taken to a hospital, where he
receives brain surgery. The next two days he dreams furiously.
In Dresden, Billy and Derby spend the month before the city’s destruction, working in a malt syrup factory.
Billy eats the nutritious syrup. He shares it with Edgar Derby, who is working outside of the factory. This
makes Derby cry.
Analysis
These two, brief chapters follow Billy from the prison camp to the month he spends in Dresden before it is
bombed, including information about the plane crash mentioned in the beginning of the story, as well as
Billy’s eventual death.
While Billy’s war experiences seem real enough, his perception of time and belief in flying saucers is quite
odd. Yet Billy is odd even as a soldier. In earlier chapters he has seen people haloed with Saint Elmo’s fire; he
hears the objects in the coat calling to him and even giving him advice.
As the book develops, the timing of Billy’s time traveling episodes seems more suspect. In Chapter Five, he
time travels when asked by Valencia to recall an unpleasant memory, and in Chapter Seven, Billy time travels
Chapters 6−7 Summary and Analysis
24
in response to his precognition of the plane’s demise. Stress seems a possible trigger for Billy’s time travel,
but it may not be the only reason they occur.
The exact nature of these episodes remains ambiguous. Chapter Deven says Billy’s time travels are true,
which must be the case if he can see his death and predict a plane crash. Yet the fact that Billy’s skull is
fractured in the wreck and that he undergoes brain surgery casts aspersions on his reliability. It is entirely
possible that Billy hallucinates his death in response to the head trauma he experiences as a result of the plane
crash. Even his daughter questions the timing of the plane crash and Billy’s decision to preach the
Tralfamadorian way. Yet the text says his time travels are true and treats Billy’s seemingly psychic moments
as unremarkable. It is therefore up to the individual reader to interpret the evidence and form his or her own
conclusion about Billy’s perceptions.
During these chapters, Edgar Derby has remained generally static. Most of his actions have been perfectly in
keeping with his description in the text, which says he is a man “mournfully pregnant with patriotism and
middle age and imaginary wisdom”. In light of this description, the only action he takes, which makes him
come alive, is when he cries when Billy gives him a spoon of malt syrup. He may be realizing that the truth of
war is going to be suffering rather that noble actions. Billy’s gift is selfless and kind, and Derby’s response
acknowledges that in times of war this is the type of action that is truly remarkable.
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Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis
New Characters:
Howard W. Campbell, Jr.: an American Nazi propagandist
Kilgore Trout: a reclusive science fiction author
Maggie White: a beautiful, if simple, woman married to an optometrist
Robert: Billy’s son, the future Green Beret
Summary
Howard Campbell comes to the American prisoners. He wants to recruit them to fight against the Russians.
He bribes the weary, undernourished men with promises of good food.
Surprisingly, Edgar Derby stands against Campbell’s poisonous promises. He says that the Americans are
going to unite with the Russians to crush Nazism. Then the air−raid siren starts to sound. All the men,
including Campbell, hide in a meat locker far under the ground. However, no bombs fall, as they aren’t
scheduled to fall until the next day.
That night, Billy returns to the argument with his daughter. She expresses anger at Kilgore Trout, whom she
blames for her father’s problems. Trout is living in Ilium, where he works as a circulation manager for the
local newspaper. Billy meets him in 1964. Billy is as amazed to find Trout as Trout is amazed to find
someone who has read his books. Billy invites Trout to his eighteenth
wedding anniversary party.
Because he is the only person at the party who is not an optometrist, Trout is a great hit. He tells Maggie
White all sorts of lies about his work. The optometrist barbershop quartet begins to sing a song which upsets
Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis
25
Billy so much people think he is having a heart attack. It reminds Billy that he has been keeping a secret
inside himself, although he can no longer remember what it is. Trout accuses Billy of having seen through a
time window, which Billy denies. Billy then hands Valencia the ring he bought her for an anniversary gift.
Curious about Billy’s reaction, Trout follows him around the house until the quartet starts to sing again. This
bothers Billy so intensely that he has to leave the party. He runs upstairs, where he finds Robert sitting on the
toilet with his electric guitar. Billy leaves him and goes into his bedroom.
Billy tries to understand why the quartet bothered him. The effort brings up a crystal clear memory. The
American prisoners spent the night in the meat locker while Dresden was destroyed and its population burnt
within their shelters. When the guards and the Americans emerged the next day, the burnt out city was like the
surface of the moon. The expressions of the four Germans as they silently huddled together, making one face
and then another, was identical to that of a barbershop quartet.
On Tralfamadore, Montana Wildhack is very pregnant. She asks Billy to tell her a story, and he relates the tale
of the German barbershop quartet. He tells her about the little logs that were actually people scattered about
the ruins of Dresden.
The group has to leave the city in search of food. They are shot at by American fighter planes as they walk
over the mountains of rubble. They make it to a suburb where an inn is open, expecting refugees from
Dresden. The guards tell the innkeeper that, after half a day’s travel, they have not seen one living person.
Analysis
At long last, Chapter Eight arrives at the bombing of Dresden, the moment which the reader hopes will never
come. In a certain sense, there has been little suspense about the event. The text has constantly pointed out
people who would die in the firestorm and discussed the temporal nature of the city’s beauty.
Yet each reminder of coming death and destruction has only made the actual event more painful to read about.
The reader has formed a relationship with the embarrassed girls in the shower and the worn down prison cook.
Sympathy has been developed for the general population of Dresden, who have gone pale from living on
potatoes. The reader can feel no sense of righteous victory over the forces of evil. In fact, one cannot help but
wish a deus ex machina to provide a happy ending, but Slaughterhouse−Five gives no such relief. The scene
is unbearably, heartbreakingly bleak.
Derby’s speech to Campbell provides an interesting commentary on the action of the text at this point, as well
as insight into Vonnegut’s political views. Campbell himself is the protagonist of Vonnegut’s Mother Night.
As presented in Slaughterhouse−Five he is basically the same character as in Mother Night—an American
working as a Nazi propagandist. Mother Night has much more detail, of course: in it, Campbell is also spying
for the American forces and suffering a terrible identity crisis.
In Slaughterhouse−Five, Campbell attempts to recruit American P.O.W.s into his “Free American Corps.”
According to Monica Loeb, although there was no Free American Corps, there was a “Free British Corps”
which was organized along similar lines and was similarly unsuccessful. Contrasted against this vile man,
Derby appears to be a hero, to become a real “character,” as the text praises him.
Yet Derby’s speech is the height of irony. He praises America as the land of “freedom and justice and
opportunities and fair play for all”). He says that any of the American soldiers would be willing to die for their
country’s ideals. However, the next day, the American sense of justice turns a blind eye to the city of Dresden,
which is destroyed out of pure malice. The bombing of Dresden is a ringing denial of the existence of justice
as a keystone of American government.
Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis
26
Perhaps, however, this “slip” can be excused as an excess of war. But the irony of Derby’s speech is extended
if one has read Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), which immediately preceded
Slaughterhouse−Five. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater describes an American system in which “opportunities
and fair play” are a myth that keeps the poor quiet. The Campbell propaganda pamphlet quoted in Chapter
Five (on the American soldier as a product of the pathetic condition of American society) is essentially a
distillation of the themes of the earlier novel. In various speeches he has made, Vonnegut has said that he
himself does not believe that the American system provides what it is supposed to, and that it would be better
supplanted by socialism. While the Campbell pamphlet could be taken as a bitter propaganda piece by a Nazi
sympathizer, it is full of analyses that disturb because they ring true, and in doing so show the lie of the
American Dream. Derby may have become a “character” at this moment in the novel, but he is still only full
of “imaginary wisdom.”
In this section of Slaughterhouse−Five, the text makes an oddly self−aware comment about what many have
seen as a failure in Vonnegut’s style. The text says, “There are almost no characters in this novel, and almost
no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of
enormous forces”.
Earlier, Vonnegut had described himself as a “trafficker in ... characterization,” one of the many tasks one
must undertake as a writer. Yet most of the characters in this book are both flat and static. As Monica Loeb
says, “Vonnegut does not develop in−depth characters, but he prefers sketchy, flat, almost stereotyped
characters”. This trait was most fully pronounced in Vonnegut’s first work, Player Piano, but it seems odd
that almost twenty years later he would write a book in which even the protagonist is not a fully developed
character .
There is little doubt, however, that Vonnegut’s underdeveloped characterization has been a choice of style. On
one hand, it is part of Vonnegut’s simple or “naive” style. The characters are defined succinctly through their
epithets (“poor, doomed Derby”) and symbolic names (the overweight, tiresome Roland Weary). Stanley
Schatt, author of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., finds Vonnegut’s simplification of characters a helpful device to keep
readers focused on the novel’s ideas. For example, Weary’s out−of−touch fantasies prove Mary O’Hare’s
belief that war books and movies glamorize the depressing truth of the matter. In this way, Vonnegut imitates
his character Trout, of whom he says (in the guise of omniscient narrator), “Only his ideas were good”.
Yet Vonnegut’s sketchy characters are but a further proof of his skill as a modern writer. Allen points out that
Vonnegut’s output during this time was firmly within the aegis of the “exploded novel,” which rejected all of
the elements Vonnegut described in Chapter One as a writer’s stock−in−trade. (Vonnegut will proceed to
satirize the death of the novel in Chapter Nine, in which a critic declares the novel of primary use as a device
for interior decorating). Vonnegut writes outside of the novel tradition, which focuses on creating realistic
characters with psychological depth. Vonnegut’s comment about the lack of characters in his novel is yet
another metafictive stab at the novel tradition: the “enormous forces” playing with his characters is no less
than the author himself. Vonnegut is announcing his presence by playfully reminding the reader that his
characters have no free will, and that the forces that manipulate characters in books are always beyond their
control.
Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut’s most popular recurring character, also makes his appearance in this chapter. As an
unsuccessful author of science−fiction books, Trout is often considered to be Vonnegut’s alter−ego. Trout’s
remarks and the summarized plots of his books allow Vonnegut, Schatt explained, to “comment on the major
themes of the book, thereby tightening the structure” . While Trout may provide some motion in the plot as a
character, he is far more useful (and more frequently used in the body of Vonnegut’s fiction) as a source of
pithy plots that critique American society. Trout’s writings should never be considered irrelevant within the
context of Vonnegut’s novels.
Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis
27
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Chapters 9−10 Summary and Analysis
New Characters:
Bertram Copeland Rumfoord: a history professor writing on Dresden
Lily Rumfoord: Rumfoord’s trophy wife
Summary
After she hears Billy’s airplane has crashed, the hysterical Valencia rushes to the hospital, ripping the exhaust
system off her car in an accident en route. Immediately after arriving, she is overcome by carbon monoxide
poisoning. Shortly thereafter, she dies.
Billy is still unconscious. He is sharing a room with Bertram Rumfoord. Rumfoord’s wife, Lily, brings
Bertram books for the history of the United States Army Air Corps in World War II that he is writing.
Rumfoord makes Lily read Truman’s statement on the necessity of bombing Hiroshima.
Although Billy finally regains consciousness, he says little and is believed to be a vegetable. Rumfoord finds
him to be disgusting and wonders out loud why the doctors don’t let Billy die.
Rumfoord is having problems with his book because the parts on Dresden are going to be new. The Air Force
and the American government had previously attempted to keep their success in Dresden a secret from the
American public. After Rumfoord expresses his frustration to Lily, Billy says that he was there.
For a long time Rumfoord refuses to acknowledge that Billy is addressing him instead of echoing him. Billy
finally speaks to him after a long silence, but Rumfoord doesn’t believe Billy was
in Dresden.
Billy time travels to Dresden, where he is riding around in a wagon with some other Americans, looking for
souvenirs. Billy is supremely happy dozing in the wagon. He is awakened by the voices of a middle aged
German couple crooning to the abused horses. They get Billy out of the wagon and show him the horses’
miserable condition. This makes Billy cry for the very first time in the war.
After questioning Billy, Rumfoord finally accepts that Billy was in Dresden. Rumfoord attempts gruffly to
sympathize with Billy, while maintaining the necessity of Dresden’s destruction. Billy agrees with everything
Rumfoord says, adding that he learned that everything has to happen the way it does while he was on
Tralfamadore.
Barbara takes Billy home later that day. He sneaks out and goes to New York City with the intention of
spreading the good news about Tralfamadore. While he is there, Billy is drawn into an adult book store by
some books by Kilgore Trout displayed in its window. The one Billy first reads turns out to be one he read
long ago. It is about a man and woman who are kidnapped from Earth and put on display in an extraterrestrial
zoo.
Billy also picks up an old girly magazine with a story about Montana Wildhack. Billy knows Montana is back
in the zoo with their baby and not dead, as the magazine says she is.
Chapters 9−10 Summary and Analysis
28
That night, Billy manages to get on the panel of a radio show. When he finally is allowed to speak, he talks
about his outer space adventures.
Back at his hotel, after being kicked out of the studio, Billy travels to Tralfamadore. He tells Montana, who is
feeding their baby, about his trip to New York. She notices that the Tralfamadorians are playing with the
clocks again. The chapter ends with an illustration of Montana’s necklace and its enigmatic slogan.
Vonnegut resumes the narrative, ticking off the deaths of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, numerous
Vietnamese, and his father. Vonnegut says that he would not be overjoyed if Billy was right and it were true
that everyone really lives forever. He’s glad he has so many nice moments to visit. High among them is his
trip back to Dresden with Bernard O’Hare.
Billy travels back to Dresden, where he, as well as O’Hare and Vonnegut, is pressed into service by German
soldiers to dig out bodies from the rubble. They find many little pockets full of well−preserved corpses.
Eventually the condition of the corpses deteriorates, and instead of being removed they are cremated on the
spot.
During this time, Edgar Derby is shot for the theft of a teapot.
Finally, World War Two is over. Billy is free. He walks out into the spring air. A bird chirps to him.
Analysis
Chapters Nine and Ten bring Slaughterhouse−Five to an enigmatic conclusion. Structurally, it is a confusing
ending because it seems that the book has reached a predictably happy ending in Chapter Nine, which ends
with Billy at home with his family on Tralfamadore. The idea that this forms the conclusion of the fictional
section of Slaughterhouse−Five is supported by Vonnegut’s initial domination of Chapter Ten, which seems
like a disguised post−script matching the introductory Chapter One.
The moment of peace is shattered, though, as Billy is reinserted in the story at the very moment Vonnegut
seems as if he is going to reminisce about his trip to Dresden with Bernard O’Hare. However the climax of the
book has not yet been reached, according to Vonnegut’s outline in Chapter One: Edgar Derby has not yet died
at the hands of a firing squad. More action seems ready to follow.
However the rest of Chapter Ten is quite relaxed. The moment of Derby’s death receives no attention; it just
happens, and is not described. It is difficult to conceive of this short paragraph as the climax of
Slaughterhouse−Five.
Has Vonnegut, then, tossed out the climax along with the other elements of the novel? Although an argument
could be constructed in support of this statement, Slaughterhouse−Five does reach a climax. The exact point
is a matter of some dispute. Stanley Schatt makes a strong argument in favor of the climax occurring when
Billy finally recollects the firebombing after the sight of the barbershop quartet affects him so strangely. As
Schatt explained, “It is only after Billy has faced the past that he is able to return to Dresden and live through
the holocaust once more.”
Yet Schatt’s interpretation seems to assume that Billy’s recollections of Dresden appear in his life after the
war in the sequence that they occur in the novel; that is, that Billy has been moving toward remembering the
entire period of his imprisonment, but has only been able to proceed toward the firebombing. This is
contradicted when Valencia mentions on her wedding night that she had overheard Billy discussing with her
father Derby’s death, which happened after the firebombing.
Chapters 9−10 Summary and Analysis
29
Billy has completely suppressed his memory of the war in order to continue his life. He denies his memories
to Valencia and, as time goes by, to himself. He has completely lost himself in “trying to construct a life that
made sense from things [he] found in gift shops”. Valencia accepts that Billy gives her rings instead of real
intimacy, because she, too, is hopelessly materialistic.
Schatt is right to say that “the firebombing is at the center of Billy’s consciousness and is much more real to
him than his shallow life as an optometrist in Ilium, New York”. For this reason, Billy needs to accept his
memories to make himself whole. This need is shown in Billy’s fantasies about Tralfama¬dore and the sexy
wife he has there. Montana, who is able to accept Billy’s time−travelling (which is how he understands what
he is experiencing), provides a rapt audience for Billy’s war experiences. In contrast, Valencia would have
been disappointed to find they are not glamorous.
Billy’s memories have been trying to fight their way back to his conscious mind for years, as his inexplicable
weeping fits show. Billy’s first move toward wholeness would therefore be to acknowledge his experiences.
He finally manages to do so (with a real person) when he tells Bertram Rumfoord, “I was there.” This is the
climax of the book. Unfortunately, the effort to integrate so much cruelty into a unified system of
understanding life is more than Billy can undertake, and he instantly retreats into Tralfamadorian fatalism
(read: insanity) because of his inability to integrate his experiences with his gentle personality. Like Derby,
Billy becomes a character in a moment of confrontation. It is a point that shows he has grown as a person.
While he may also be mad, his future popularity shows that there are many people who may turn to such a
simplistic philosophy to explain a world so inexplicably cruel.
Does Slaughterhouse−Five have a moral to match its climax? Vonnegut’s own comments in the first chapter
argue against the existence of a moral to this story. He says that there is “nothing intelligent to say about a
massacre.” The birds’ chirping says “all there is to say,” which must be, according to the preceding
sentence—nothing.
Or is it? “Poo−tee−weet” is used in Vonnegut’s fiction a number of times. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,
it is like an exclamation point attached to the protagonist’s sudden realization of how to extract himself from
the trap set for him by his family and their lawyer. Schatt says that in this instance, and in every other, the
bird’s chirp represents “the cool, detached way to deal with a catastrophe”. This is the same interpretation that
many critics have given to the phrase “So it goes.” This interpretation holds that the moral of
Slaughterhouse−Five is to remove oneself from feeling the pain of the world, as there is nothing one can do to
stop it.
Robert Uphouse, however, points out the contrast of the bird’s song with the destruction that lies around it.
Given Billy’s need to cushion himself from horror in later life, Uphouse finds “Poo−tee−weet” to be a
reminder of the human capacity for dealing with death through the imagination, as Billy and Vonnegut do.
Yet this explanation also seems unsatisfactory, since Billy’s imagination leads him astray. It seems better to
turn for an interpretation to Vonnegut himself, who says in Chapter One that after so much horror has been
wrought in the world, “everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again.”
But the birds’ still cheerful songs show the dogged, perhaps even irritating, persistence of life amidst death.
Their presence contradicts the finality of the situation, much as Billy’s wagon contradicts its coffin shape by
being green. “Poo−tee−weet”, explained in The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut, cannot help but be a sign
of hope within a “never−ending cycle of regeneration and destruction” .
Does Vonnegut have a moral? He might say he does not, but his frequently quoted statement that the role of
an artist is to be a “canary in a coal mine” encourages the reader to probe the text for its message. A message
can indeed be found, one that was most relevant when one remembers that this book was written during “the
nadir of America’s self−confidence during the Vietnam war years”, as stated in Klinkowitz’s Kurt Vonnegut.
Chapters 9−10 Summary and Analysis
30
The message is found by examining the ideas expressed by a few of Vonnegut’s cardboard characters and
keeping in mind that the characters themselves are designed to express ideas more than Vonnegut’s mastery of
psychological insight.
The character which enables Vonnegut to give a message to his story is Bertram Rumfoord. Rumfoord is the
best−developed of a series of characters who glorify war, such as the Marine major, Roland Weary, and the
British prisoners. Vonnegut makes Rumfoord a very unsympathetic man. Rumfoord is the kind of man who
uses people as objects without regard for their feelings. He married his wife to show the world that he is a
“superman,” and he thinks that Billy should be turned over to a “veterinarian or a tree surgeon,” implying that
they would do the right thing by killing him.
Most damning is Rumfoord’s attitude toward Dresden. Vonnegut has described it as a fairy city, as enchanting
as Oz, full of people that the reader feels are as human as him or herself. When Rumfoord defends its
destruction, the reader cannot help but be appalled. Like the former lieutenant colonel Vonnegut describes in
Chapter One, Rumfoord is unlikely to have done much actual fighting or suffering, and he certainly has little
feeling of kinship towards other humans. This allows him to see the Dresden raid as a “howling success”
while ignoring its cost. Like the robots in Trout’s The Gutless Wonder, Rumfoord has “no conscience, and no
circuits which would allow [him] to imagine what would happen to people on the ground”. He is the
embodiment of the “myopic morality of all apologists for war,” according to Schatt.
Vonnegut puts the lie to the statement “it had to be done.” Coming out of the mouth of a despicable man like
Rumfoord, the words are as foul as vomit. Billy’s acquiescing response that everything has to be done as it is
done—as the little green men taught him—slaps Rumfoord’s ridiculous logic back in his face. It is clear that
nothing has to be the way it is, whether in Dresden, Hiroshima, Dachau, or Vietnam. Choices are made at
every point along the way that should be made with humanity, rather than excused with empty phrases.
“The real horror is that events such as Dresden continue to occur and no one seems appalled,” as stated in
Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. The message of Slaughterhouse−Five, then, is to reject the lie “it has to be
done,” in war or elsewhere. Vonnegut is a canary in a coal mine, warning us that to let this attitude pass
unchallenged, to deny that there are moral questions to be asked, to passively accept that history cannot be
altered is to let atrocities happen again and again.
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Quizzes
1. Chapter 1 Questions and Answers
2. Chapter 2 Questions and Answers
3. Chapter 3 Questions and Answers
4. Chapter 4 Questions and Answers
5. Chapter 5 Questions and Answers
6. Chapters 6−7 Questions and Answers
7. Chapter 8 Questions and Answers
8. Chapters 9−10 Questions and Answers
Quizzes
31
Chapter 1 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. What does Vonnegut say his breath smells like when he has been drinking?
2. What is strange about the set−up Mary O’Hare arranged for Vonnegut and her husband to talk about the
war?
3. What does Vonnegut say World War II did for people?
4. Which previous occurrences of the destruction of cities does Vonnegut mention?
5. What is the only sound that disturbs the quiet following a massacre?
6. How does Vonnegut’s boss in Schenectady compare to the other veterans Vonnegut meets there?
7. How does Vonnegut describe the carp in the Hudson river?
8. Whose death sets off the first “So it goes?”
9. How many books does Vonnegut refer to reading in this chapter?
10. Why does Vonnegut say he loves Lot’s wife?
Answers
1. He says his breath smells like mustard gas and roses.
2. It is bright and uncomfortable, rather like an operating room.
3. World War Two has made everyone very tough.
4. Vonnegut reads about the flattening of Dresden in 1760, as well as the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah.
5. The only exception to the general hush is the chirping of birds.
6. Vonnegut’s boss is hostile and implies there is something wrong with him for not having been an officer in
the war. The other veterans are kind men who hate war because of their experiences fighting.
7. Vonnegut says they “were as big as atomic submarines”.
8. “So it goes” is said for the first time after Vonnegut mentions the Dresden taxi driver’s mother who was
burnt to ashes in the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden.
9. Vonnegut mentions five books in Chapter One.
10. Vonnegut loves Lot’s wife, because her looking back to see Sodom and Gomorrah is “so human.”
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Chapter 1 Questions and Answers
32
Chapter 2 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. What is the name of the fighting group to which Weary imagines he belongs?
2. How does Billy later find one of his army practice maneuvers to provide a Tralfamadorian type of
adventure?
3. Why was Billy not missed while he was in the Tralfamadorian zoo?
4. Why does Billy say he did not talk about his adventures before the plane accident?
5. How do Tralfamadorians perceive time?
6. How do Tralfamadorians understand death?
7. What phrase is the Tralfamadorian response to death?
8. How does Billy’s vocation parallel his purpose in propounding Tralfamadorian philosophy?
9. How does Billy’s first time travel experience parallel his condition in real time?
10. Why do Billy and Weary surprise the German soldiers?
Answers
1. The group is called the Three Musketeers.
2. In later life, the experience of having his unit eat lunch after the men in it were pronounced “dead” struck
him as a very Tralfamadorian experience.
3. Billy was taken through a time warp, so although he was on Tralfamadore for years, he was only gone from
Earth for less than a second.
4. Billy thought the time was not ripe.
5. Tralfamadorians see time all at once, like a mountain range.
6. Tralfamadorians see death as just one bad moment, with plenty of other good moments of life existing
alongside it.
7. “So it goes” is what the Tralfamadorians say about the dead.
8. Billy, who as an optometrist, helps people to see clearly, wants to provide vision for people’s souls.
9. In both events, Billy is peacefully waiting for death.
10. They do not understand why one American is trying to kill another. They also do not understand why
Billy is laughing.
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Chapter 2 Questions and Answers
33
Chapter 3 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. In what context have the blue and white feet of this chapter’s corpses previously appeared?
2. What precise phrase describes the condition of Weary’s feet?
3. How do the actions of the teenaged German soldier toward Billy contrast to Weary’s treatment of him?
4. What underlying misconception fuels Wild Bob’s ranting?
5. How does Vonnegut humanize the German guards?
6. What heavenly visions does Billy have in this chapter?
7. What is ironic about Billy’s lack of discussion at the Lions Club meeting he attends in this chapter?
8. How does the adult Billy’s attitude toward his son’s profession differ from what Vonnegut says he has
inculcated in his sons?
9. What does the former hobo have to say about conditions on the boxcar?
10. Why was Billy thrown into a shrubbery by the Germans?
Answers
1. Chapter Two described Billy as having blue and white feet as he typed in the basement of his frigid house.
2. They are being turned into “blood puddings”.
3. While Weary was ready to beat Billy senseless, the German boy helps Billy to his feet.
4. Wild Bob is still imagining that war is neat. He is essentially living in a war movie rather than in the reality
of war.
5. Rather than shooting at Billy when he is seen looking out of the ventilator of his boxcar, the guard just
wags his finger at him.
6. Billy sees Adam and Eve in a German soldier’s boots and a little paradise inside the guard’s boxcar.
7. Even though Billy has seen the tremendous destruction and suffering caused by the bombing of Dresden, he
registers absolutely no response, spoken or unspoken, to the Marine major who gives a speech in favor of
bombing North Korea back to the Stone Age.
8. While Billy tells the Marine major that he is proud of his Green Beret son, Vonnegut has said that he has
told his sons never to take part in massacres.
9. He says things aren’t so bad.
10. They wanted to stage an “actual capture” for a German reporter to photograph.
Chapter 3 Questions and Answers
34
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Chapter 4 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. Where has the phrase “mustard gas and roses” previously appeared?
2. What promise does Paul Lazzaro make to Roland Weary before he dies?
3. Aside from crowding, what hardships do the Americans endure on their voyage to the prison camp?
4. How is Billy’s coat different from everyone else’s?
5. Give three details from this chapter that highlight the irony of Edgar Derby’s eventual execution.
6. Why is Billy not allowed to sleep on the floor with everyone else?
7. How does the Tralfamadorian say his kind sees time?
8. What two people die on the way to the prison?
9. For what purpose was the German camp constructed?
10. What is the first question Billy has for the Tralfamadorian?
Answers
1. Vonnegut used this phrase to describe his own breath in Chapter One.
2. Lazzaro promises to punish Billy Pilgrim for causing Weary’s death.
3. It is very cold outside, and they receive no more food.
4. Billy is the only person to receive a civilian’s coat.
5. First, Derby had to pull strings to get to fight in the war. Second, his treatment of Roland Weary shows him
to be a good man. Third, Derby is one of the few men who actually
appears fit enough to be a soldier.
6. He kicks and makes noise in his sleep.
7. He says Tralfamadorians see time stretched out like the Rocky Mountains.
8. Roland Weary and the kindly bum both die.
9. It was intended to be a place for the extermination of Russian captives.
10. Billy asks, “Why me?”
Chapter 4 Questions and Answers
35
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Chapter 5 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. What does Billy dream of when he is on morphine?
2. How does the scene with the punched prisoner parallel an experience Billy has with the Tralfamadorians?
3. What does Eliot Rosewater have to say about The Brothers Kamazarov?
4. While visiting Billy what does Valencia’s chosen topic of conversation say about her personality?
5. What is the problem with the Bible as it stands, according to The Gospel from Outer Space?
6. At what two points does Vonnegut insert himself into the narrative of this chapter?
7. How does the universe end, according to the Tralfama¬dorians?
8. How is Montana Wildhack’s body described?
9. Why was Paul Lazzaro’s arm broken?
10. Why does Billy think he can make his young patient happy?
Answers
1. Billy dreams he is a giraffe.
2. Both prisoners ask, “Why me?” to which the German responds, “Why anybody?” and the Tralfamadorian,
“Why anything?”
3. It used to contain everything there was to know about life, but it just wasn’t enough anymore.
4. Valencia’s discussion of silver patterns makes her appear to be very shallow.
5. The Bible teaches that it is okay to lynch people who have no connections, according to the alien narrator of
Trout’s book.
6. Vonnegut says that Billy’s epitaph would be good “for me, too.” In concluding the passage about the sick
American soldiers, Vonnegut says of one, “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”
7. An experimental Tralfamadorian jet fuel blows up the universe.
8. She is described as having baroque detailing, like the buildings of Dresden before they were bombed.
9. He was trying to steal cigarettes from one of the Englishmen.
10. If the little boy can grasp Billy’s philosophy of death, he’ll understand that he can see his father any time
he wants to.
Chapter 5 Questions and Answers
36
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Chapters 6−7 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. Does Billy get committed to an asylum after the incident in his optometry office?
2. What does Paul Lazarro say is the sweetest thing in life?
3. Why does Billy take Cinderella’s silver boots?
4. What animal disease is used to describe Paul Lazarro?
5. Why are the Dresdeners the color of putty?
6. What mistake does Billy make after the plane crash?
7. Which of the “millions of things” that Billy dreams after his operation are true?
8. What sarcastic comment does the cook in the communal kitchen of the slaughterhouse make to Billy,
Derby, and their 16−year−old guard?
9. What benefit does working at the malt syrup factory have?
10. Why are there spoons hidden all over the factory?
Answers
1. He is not committed. His Tralfamadorian philosophy apparently becomes very popular some time between
the publication of his first letters and 1976.
2. He says that revenge is the sweetest thing.
3. His own shoes have been nearly destroyed.
4. Lazarro is described as “fizzing with rabies.” If he were a dog, he would have been shot.
5. They have been living off potatoes for two years.
6. He thinks he is back in World War II.
7. According to the text, the true things he dreams were time−travel.
8. She says that all of the real soldiers are dead.
9. The syrup is very nutritious and good to eat.
10. It is illegal to eat the syrup.
Chapters 6−7 Questions and Answers
37
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Chapter 8 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. What detail about the hog barn shows how intense the firestorm that engulfed Dresden must have been?
2. What is Campbell’s final argument in favor of fighting the Russians?
3. Who does Barbara blame for Billy’s problems?
4. How does Trout’s book “The Gutless Wonder” recall Billy’s son, Robert?
5. Why does the narrator claim there are few to no characters in this story?
6. How did the troop of Americans come to have only four guards?
7. What episode immediately follows Billy’s recollection of the painful memory of Dresden?
8. How does Billy’s response to the barbershop quartet reflect a conversation he had with Valencia on their
wedding night?
9. How is Billy’s survival given a further component of randomness on the march to the inn?
10. What is odd about the innkeeper’s kindness to the American prisoners?
Answers
1. The fire was hot enough to leave “dollops of melted glass” on the ground.
2. He says that the Americans are going to have to fight the Communists “sooner or later.”
3. Barbara blames Kilgore Trout.
4. Billy’s son is a Green Beret in Vietnam, presumably dropping jellied gasoline on people or committing
some similar atrocities.
5. There are few characters in the book because the characters in it are “so sick and so much the listless
playthings of enormous forces” (140). This, the narrative adds, is one of the main effects of war.
6. The others left to be with their families.
7. Billy’s memory of Dresden directly precedes a scene in the zoo with Montana.
8. Valencia had said to Billy that she thought he was full of secrets, which he denied. Now he discovers that
he has been keeping secrets, but he can’t remember what they are.
9. Billy’s group nearly misses being shot by American fighting planes out “mopping up.”
Chapter 8 Questions and Answers
38
10. Given that the Allies have just destroyed Dresden and all of the people in it, it might have been more
appropriate for the innkeeper to abuse the men instead of giving them food and a place to stay.
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Chapters 9−10 Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. How do the aliens from Zircon−212 manipulate their human captives?
2. When did Billy previously read The Big Board?
3. What does the wagon Billy rides in look like?
4. What is the topic of the panel Billy sneaks into?
5. What killed the Maori soldier?
6. Where has the message on Montana’s necklace previously appeared?
7. Why is Barbara glassy−eyed when she comes to visit her father in the hospital?
8. Why does Rumfoord say the Air Force wanted to cover up the bombing of Dresden?
9. Which historical personage do the Tralfamadorians find fascinating?
10. Where has the special picture the owners of the bookstore kept behind the counter previously appeared?
Answers
1. They make the humans think that they are investing in stocks for them back on Earth.
2. He read it when he was in the mental ward of the veterans’ hospital.
3. It is green and coffin shaped.
4. The panelists have gathered to discuss the death of the novel.
5. He died of the dry heaves.
6. It was the motto on the wall of Billy’s office.
7. She has been put under sedation because of the death of her mother and collapse of her father.
8. He says that the bombing was kept a secret because of the “bleeding hearts.”
9. The Tralfamadorians are very sympathetic to the philosophy of Charles Darwin.
10. It is the same picture that Roland Weary was carrying around with him in Germany.
Chapters 9−10 Questions and Answers
39
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Themes
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse−Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who is "unstuck" in time. The
two central events Billy keeps returning to are his abduction by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore and his
time as a prisoner of war during World War II, during which he witnesses the Allied firebombing of the
German city of Dresden.
Alienation and Loneliness
Alienation may be defined as, among other things, an inability to make connections with other individuals and
with society as a whole. In this sense, Billy Pilgrim is a profoundly alienated individual. He is unable to
connect in a literal sense, as his being "unstuck in time" prevents him from building the continuous set of
experiences which form a person's relationships with others. While Billy's situation is literal in the sense of
being a science fiction device—he is "literally" travelling through time—it also serves as a metaphor for the
sense of alienation and dislocation which follows the experience of catastrophic violence (World War II). This
violence is, for Vonnegut and many other modern writers, a fact of life for humanity in the twentieth century.
It is appropriate that what is arguably the closest relationship Billy has in the novel is with the science fiction
writer Kilgore Trout, another deeply alienated individual: "he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in
similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the war." Free
Will
One of the most important themes of Slaughterhouse−Five is that of free will, or, more precisely, its absence.
This concept is articulated through the philosophy of the Tralfamadorians, for whom time is not a linear
progression of events, but a constant condition: "All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed,
always will exist." All beings exist in each moment of time like "bugs in amber," a fact that nothing can alter.
"Only on Earth is there any talk of free will." What happens, happens. "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could
not change were the past, the present, and the future." Accordingly, the Tralfamadorians advise Billy "to
concentrate on the happy moments of life, and to ignore the unhappy ones."
Apathy and Passivity
Apathy and passivity are natural responses to the idea that events are beyond our control. Throughout
Slaughterhouse−Five Billy Pilgrim does not act so much as he is acted upon. If he is not captured by the
Germans, he is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians. Only later in life, when Billy tries to tell the world about
his abduction by the Tralfamadorians, does he initiate action, and even that may be seen as a kind of response
to his predetermined fate. Other characters may try to varying degrees to initiate actions, but seldom to any
avail. As Vonnegut notes in Chapter Eight, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no
dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of
enormous forces."
Death
Given the absence of free will and the inevitability of events, there is little reason to be overly concerned
about death. The Tralfamadorian response to death is, "So it goes," and Vonnegut repeats this phrase at every
point in the novel where someone, or something, dies. Billy Pilgrim, in his travels through time, "has seen his
own death many times" and is unconcerned because he knows he will always exist in the past.
Patriotism
The world as depicted in Slaughterhouse−Five is a world in which patriotism twists into nationalism and
militarism and becomes an excuse for acts of violence and mass destruction. Those who claim to be patriots,
Themes
40
such as "Wild Bob,"the American prisoner of war who gives speeches to imaginary troops, or Bertrand
Copeland Rumfoord, an Air Force historian who defends the Dresden raid, are deluded at best and malevolent
at worst. More realistic is the reaction of the German soldiers in Dresden to the American prisoners: "There
was nothing to be afraid of. Here were more crippled human beings, more fools like themselves."
War and Peace
Slaughterhouse−Five deals with many different themes, but it is most of all a novel about the horrors of war.
For Vonnegut, war is not an enterprise of glory and heroism, but an uncontrolled catastrophe for all involved,
and anyone who seeks glory and heroism in war is deluded. Although World War II is regarded by most as a
justified conflict which defeated the genocidal regime of Nazi Germany, Vonnegut sees only victims on all
sides, from the American soldier executed by the Germans for looting to the 135,000 German civilians killed
in the Allied firebombing of Dresden. The horrors of the war are so overwhelming that Vonnegut doubts his
ability to write about them. Speaking directly in the first chapter, he says of the novel, "It is so short and
jumbled and jangled ... because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." The only response to the
nightmare of war is a profound alienation and distancing, made literal by Billy Pilgrim's being "unstuck in
time." Appropriately, Billy's condition offers the most striking image of peace in the novel, as he becomes
unstuck in time while watching a war movie on television and sees it backwards:
The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk
the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the
bellies of the planes ... The steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the
United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the
cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals... [which] were then shipped to
specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them
cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
Science and Technology
Although Slaughterhouse−Five does not deal as directly with issues of science and technology as do other
Vonnegut novels such as Player Piano and Cat's Cradle, the limitations of technology remain an important
theme. The destruction of World War II would not have been possible without "advances" in technology (the
long−range bombers that destroyed Dresden; the poison gas used on concentration camp inmates). And the
extraordinarily advanced technology of the Tralfamadorians not only cannot prevent the end of the Universe,
but actually causes it: "We [Tralfamadorians] blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying
saucers."
» Back to Table of Contents
Style
Structure
Perhaps the most notable aspect of Slaughterhouse−Five's technique is its unusual structure. The novel's
protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, has come "unstuck in time"; at any point in his life, he may find himself suddenly
at another point in his past or future. Billy's time travel begins early on during the major experience of his
life—his capture by German soldiers during World War II and subsequent witnessing of the Allied
firebombing of Dresden, Germany. Both the centrality of this event and its radically alienating effect on the
rest of Billy's life are represented by the novel's structure. Billy's experiences as a prisoner of war are told in
more or less chronological order, but these events are continually interrupted by Billy's travels to various other
times in his life, both past and future. In this way, the novel's structure highlights both the centrality of Billy's
war experiences to his life, as well as the profound dislocation and alienation he feels after the war.
Style
41
Point of View
Another unusual aspect of Slaughterhouse−Five is its use of point of view. Rather than employing a
conventional third−person "narrative voice," the novel is narrated by the author himself. The first chapter
consists of Vonnegut discussing the difficulties he had in writing the novel, and Vonnegut himself appears
onstage as a character several times later in the novel. Instead of obscuring the autobiographical elements of
the novel, Vonnegut makes them explicit; instead of presenting his novel as a self−contained creative work,
he makes it clear that it is an imperfect and incomplete attempt to come to terms with an overwhelming event.
In a sentence directed to his publisher, Vonnegut says of the novel, "It is so short and jumbled and jangled,
Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre."
Symbolism
Slaughterhouse−Five is, among other things, a work of science fiction. As such, both Billy Pilgrim's travels
through time and his abduction by aliens are presented as literal events. However, as in the best science
fiction, these literal events also have symbolic significance Billy's being "unstuck in time" is both a literal
event and a metaphor for the sense of profound dislocation and alienation felt by the survivors of war, while
the aliens from the planet Tralfamadore provide a vehicle for Vonnegut's speculations on fate and free will.
Style
Style—the way an author arranges his or her words, sentences, and paragraphs into prose—is one of the most
difficult aspects of literature to analyze. However, it should be noted that Slaughterhouse−Five is written in a
very distinctive style. In describing overwhelming, horrible, and often inexplicable events, Vonnegut
deliberately uses a very simple, straightforward prose style. He often describes complex events in the
language one might use to explain something to a child, as in this description of Billy Pilgrim being marched
to a German prison camp:
A motion−picture camera was set up at the border— to record the fabulous victory. Two
civilians in bearskin coats were leaning on the camera when Billy and Weary came by. They
had run out of film hours ago.
One of them singled out Billy's face for a moment, then focused at infinity again. There was a
tiny plume of smoke at infinity. There was a battle there. People were dying there. So it goes.
In writing this way, Vonnegut forces the reader to confront the fundamental horror and absurdity of war
head−on, with no embellishments, as if his readers were seeing it clearly for the first time.
Black Humor
Black humor refers to an author's deliberate use of humor in describing what would ordinarily be considered a
situation too violent, grim, or tragic to laugh at. In so doing, the author is able to convey not merely the
tragedy, but also the absurdity, of an event. Vonnegut uses black humor throughout Slaughterhouse−Five,
both in small details (the description of the half−crazed Billy Pilgrim, after the Battle of the Bulge, as a "filthy
flamingo") and in larger plot elements (Billy's attempts to publicize his encounters with the Tralfamadorians),
to reinforce the idea that the horrors of war are not only tragic, but inexplicable and absurd.
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Historical Context
The Firebombing of Dresden
The most important historical event which informs Slaughterhouse−Five took place almost a quarter of a
Historical Context
42
century before the novel was published. On February 13 and 14, 1945, allied aircraft dropped incendiary
bombs on the German city of Dresden—a so−called "open city" with no significant military targets. The
bombing raid created a firestorm that destroyed the city and killed an estimated 135,000 people, almost all of
them civilians. This was nearly twice the number of people killed by the first atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima. The Dresden bombing remains the single heaviest air strike in military history. The raid remains
controversial to this day, as many historians have suggested that the raid served no real military purpose and
did nothing to hasten Germany's defeat. Approximately one hundred American prisoners of war, captured at
the Battle of the Bulge, were in Dresden during the bombing. Vonnegut was one of them.
The Vietnam War
The war between communist North Vietnam and non−communist South Vietnam began in 1954 and ended in
1975 with a North Vietnamese victory and the reunification of Vietnam under communist rule. This same
time period also covered most of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, a political
conflict which led to the United States entering the Vietnam War on the side of South Vietnam. The year
before Vonnegut's novel was published, 1968, saw the American presence in Vietnam peak at 543,000 troops.
As American involvement increased, so did opposition to the war among Americans. By 1969, a sitting
President, Lyndon Johnson, had chosen not to run for reelection because of his role in prosecuting the war.
Also, antiwar sentiment had taken the form of mass demonstrations and the migration of thousands of young
American men to Canada, Sweden, and other countries in order to avoid the draft.
Although Vonnegut's novel is centered on events which took place in the 1940s during World War II, it is
very much a product of the Vietnam era. Vonnegut even makes direct references to Vietnam in Chapter Three,
when Billy Pilgrim, in 1967, listens to a speech by a Marine urging increased bombing of North Vietnam.
And in Chapter Ten Vonnegut refers to the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert
Kennedy while observing that "every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military
science in Vietnam." It is perhaps no surprise that a novel which faced head−on the horrors of war, as well as
American responsibility for some of those horrors, struck a chord with the reading public at a time when many
Americans were beginning to think their country had made a terrible mistake.
The UFO Phenomenon
An important element of Slaughterhouse−Five is Billy Pilgrim's abduction by aliens from the planet
Tralfamadore. In the 1990s, "alien abduction" has become a well−recognized cultural myth, as countless
individuals claim to have been abducted by aliens from outer space. Public speculation about UFOs
(Unidentified Flying Objects) and the possibility of life on other planets is at an all−time high, fueled by both
popular entertainment (television shows such as Star Trek and The X−Files, movies such as E.T. and
Independence Day), scientific discoveries (the identification of planets outside our solar system), and news
events (the Heaven's Gate mass suicides of 1997).
Although Vonnegut's novel predates the current wave of popular awareness of UFOs, the phenomenon was
already well−documented when Slaughterhouse−Five appeared in 1969. Beginning in 1947, reports of UFOs
came in waves from all over the world. Between 1965 and 1967, the U.S. Air Force received almost three
thousand reports of UFO sightings. In 1966, there was even a congressional hearing on the subject, and the
Air Force appointed scientist Edward U. Condon to investigate the matter. Condon's conclusion—that there
was "no direct evidence whatever" that UFOs were in fact extraterrestrial spacecraft—was the subject of great
controversy.
Science Fiction
Slaughterhouse−Five is, among other things, a science fiction novel, and it is also a novel with a strong
awareness of the history of science fiction. Vonnegut began his writing career labeled as a science fiction
writer, a classification he never fully escaped until the 1960s. In its use of the alien Tralfamadorians, his novel
shows a keen awareness of the staples of both written "pulp" science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s and the
Historical Context
43
popular movies of the 1950s. The character of Kilgore Trout is especially interesting in this regard. Some
critics have seen Trout—a visionary writer doomed to poverty and obscurity because of his work in a literary
genre considered to be inferior to "real" literature—as a projection of Vonnegut's own fears of how he might
have wound up if he had not escaped the "science fiction" label. Others have suggested that Trout is modeled
on actual science fiction writers of the 1950s, especially Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon.
» Back to Table of Contents
Critical Overview
There is a substantial body of criticism on Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s work in general, and on Slaughterhouse−Five
in particular. While critics have often found Vonnegut's fiction as a whole to be uneven in quality, they have
frequently praised him for Slaughterhouse−Five, which is widely regarded as the author's finest work.
The tone for much of the criticism that followed the book's release was set by Robert Scholes in his review of
Slaughterhouse−Five, which appeared in the New York Times Book Review shortly after the novel's
publication in 1969. Scholes praised Vonnegut's humor, noting that it "does not disguise the awful things
perceived; it merely strengthens and comforts us to the point where such perception is bearable." He asserted
that the absurd elements of the novel are appropriate and necessary to deal with the absurdity of the world. He
considered the novel to be "an extraordinary success ... a book we need to read, and to reread ... funny,
compassionate, and wise." The noted critic Granville Hicks, reviewing the novel in Saturday Review,
compared Vonnegut to Mark Twain as both a humorist and moralist.
Much of the later criticism of Slaughterhouse−Five has emphasized the book's unusual and innovative
structure. In Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels (1977), Richard Giannone observed that "Vonnegut the
witness draws moral force by undermining conventional narrative authority" and "comments on the reality of
Dresden by treating the problems of fiction." In his 1990 study "Slaughterhouse−Five": Reforming the Novel
and the World, Jerome Klinkowitz observed that the Tralfamadorian concept of time is also "the overthrow of
nearly every Aristotelian convention that has contributed to the novel's form in English over the past three
centuries." And in an earlier study of Vonnegut, Klinkowitz links the author's experiments with narrative form
to those of other experimental writers of the 1960s, such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas
Pynchon.
Several critics have also focused on Slaughterhouse−Five as a work of science fiction. Reviewing the novel in
the New Republic, J. Michael Crichton compared it to works by such well−known science fiction authors as
Robert A. Heinlein, J. G. Ballard, and Roger Zelazny, all of whom were, like Vonnegut, popular among the
youth "counterculture" of the 1960s. James Lundquist spent a chapter of his 1977 study of Vonnegut
examining Vonnegut's connections to science fiction, noting especially the character of science fiction
novelist Kilgore Trout. Interestingly, critics from within the science fiction field are frequently uncomfortable
with Vonnegut's use of science fiction devices. Thomas D. Clareson, writing in Understanding Contemporary
American Science Fiction, agreed with noted British science fiction novelist and critic Brian W. Aldiss that
Vonnegut's use of time travel and other science fiction devices is "intrusive."
While the critical reception of Slaughterhouse−Five has been overwhelmingly positive, some critics have
expressed reservations concerning the novel's apparent endorsement of passive acceptance as an appropriate
response to evil. Crichton suggested that Vonnegut "refuses to say who is wrong ... ascribes no blame, sets no
penalties." And Tony Tanner, in his 1971 book City of Words, worried that Vonnegut's vision is one of "moral
indifference." The overwhelming popular success of Slaughterhouse−Five has also been somewhat tempered
by the fact that it is one of the novels most frequently banned from high school classrooms. This is
Critical Overview
44
presumably because of its unsparing violence and occasionally explicit language. Nonetheless, Vonnegut's
novel has maintained a level of popular and critical success seldom achieved by any book. Most readers and
critics have agreed with Tanner, who, despite his concerns about "moral indifference," concluded that
Vonnegut's most famous work is "a masterly novel" of "clarity and economy—and compassion."
» Back to Table of Contents
Character Analysis
1. Billy Pilgrim
2. Other Characters
Billy Pilgrim
At one point in Slaughterhouse−Five, Vonnegut writes, "There are almost no characters in this story ...
because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces." This
description certainly applies to Billy. From his earliest childhood memories of being tossed in the deep end of
a pool to learn how to swim, or being dragged against his will on a family vacation to the Grand Canyon,
Billy has been at the mercy of "enormous forces." As a soldier captured after the Battle of the Bulge by
German soldiers, Billy is pathetically unprepared for the pressures of combat and reacts to the horrific events
he witnesses, including the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, with varying degrees of disassociation and
withdrawal. It is while he is a prisoner that he first becomes "unstuck in time," finding himself travelling into
the past and future with no warning. This time travel is both a literal science−fiction event and a metaphor for
the alienation and dislocation Billy, and contemporary humanity, feel in the face of overwhelming and
inexplicable cruelty and violence.
Billy is later kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. The aliens' philosophy explicitly rejects the
concept of free will. They believe that events cannot be changed by a person's actions. This idea reinforces the
theme that Billy, and everyone else, is at the mercy of forces largely beyond our control. In fact, the only
active response Billy has during the entire novel is his attempt to publicize his abduction by aliens. It is
appropriate that the closest relationship Billy has is not with his wife or family but with Kilgore Trout, a
science fiction writer whose novels see through the illusion of logic and control.
After the war, Billy becomes an optometrist, marries, and has two children. His life is mundane, but he
continues his time−traveling experiences, which are, like everything else, beyond his power to control. His
time spent with the Tralfamadorians helps him to gain a peaceful perspective on life. In the end, Billy comes
to accept the fact that he cannot change events, and he devotes life to teaching the philosophy of the
Tralfamadorians to the people of Earth.
» Back to Section Index
» Back to Table of Contents
Other Characters
Billy Pilgrim's father
Billy Pilgrim's father, whose full name is not given, is a barber in Ilium, New York. He dies in a hunting
Character Analysis
45
accident while Billy is in military training in South Carolina. Billy attends his funeral shortly before being
shipped overseas.
Billy Pilgrim's mother
Billy's mother, whose name is not given, survives into old age. Billy visits her in a rest home in 1965.
Wild Bob
Wild Bob is an American prisoner of war who dies en route to Dresden. Shortly before he dies, he gives a
speech to imaginary troops encouraging them to continue fighting the Germans and inviting them to visit him
in the United States after the war. His delusions as to his troops and the glories of combat represent the overall
absurdity of both war and the attempt to control the uncontrollable.
Howard W. Campbell Jr.
An American who has gone over to the Nazis and works in the German Ministry of Propaganda, Campbell
visits the American prisoners in Dresden and tries to convince them to leave the Allies. Campbell is also the
main character in Vonnegut's earlier novel Mother Night.
Colonel
See Wild Bob
Edgar Derby
Derby is a high school teacher from Indianapolis who becomes the unofficial leader of the American prisoners
in Dresden. He is a fundamentally decent man and a natural leader. He is also very kind to Billy Pilgrim. After
the firebombing of Dresden, he is caught stealing a teapot and is shot by the Germans for plundering—a
pointless death that underscores the absurdity and tragedy of war.
English colonel
See Head Englishman
Head Englishman
The head of the English prisoners of war is a colonel. He is friendly but slightly condescending to the
Americans, who do not share the English prisoners' determination to remain disciplined, organized, and
cheerful during their captivity.
Paul Lazzaro
Lazzaro is an American prisoner of war in Dresden who befriends Roland Weary and promises to avenge
Weary's death, which Weary blames on Billy. Lazzaro survives the war and hires the assassin who kills Billy
in 1976.
Lionel Merble
Lionel Merble is Billy Pilgrim's father−in−law. He sets Billy up in a successful optometry practice. He is
killed in a plane crash when he and Billy are travelling to an optometrist's convention; Billy and the copilot
are the only survivors. Although not a bad man, Lionel Merble may be seen as representing the callousness
and shallow materialism of postwar America.
Bernard V. O'Hare
Bernard is Vonnegut's "old war buddy" with whom Vonnegut witnessed the Dresden firebombing. A real−life
person with whom Vonnegut travelled back to Dresden in the 1960s, Bernard makes an appearance at the
novel's beginning.
Character Analysis
46
Mary O'Hare
Mary O'Hare is Bernard's wife and another real−life person to appear in the novel. Mary objects to Vonnegut's
writing about Dresden, worrying that he might make war seem romantic and glamorous. Vonnegut promises
that he will subtitle his book "The Children's Crusade."
Barbara Pilgrim
Barbara is Billy Pilgrim's daughter. It is on the night of her wedding that Billy is kidnapped by the
Tralfamadorians. After her mother's death, Barbara assumes a parental role with the increasingly detached
Billy and is both impatient with and embarrassed by Billy's stories about the Tralfamadorians.
Robert Pilgrim
Robert is Billy Pilgrim's son. After having "a lot of trouble" in high school, Robert joined the military, became
a Green Beret, fought in Vietnam, and "became a fine young man."
Valencia Merble Pilgrim
Valencia is Billy Pilgrim's wife. A wealthy but unattractive woman, she is hopelessly in love with Billy, but
Billy never really loves her and sees her as "one of the symptoms of his disease." While Billy is hospitalized
after surviving his plane crash, Valencia is killed in a traffic accident while rushing to be with Billy in the
hospital—another innocent victim of an absurd and indifferent universe.
Eliot Rosewater
Eliot Rosewater is a friendly eccentric with whom Billy Pilgrim shares a hospital room after Billy's
breakdown. Rosewater and Billy "both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the
war." It is Rosewater who introduces Billy to science fiction, especially the novels of Kilgore Trout.
Rosewater is also the title character of Vonnegut's earlier novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
Bertrand Copeland Rumfoord
A Harvard professor and official Historian of the U.S. Air Force, Rumfoord shares a hospital room with Billy
Pilgrim after Pilgrim's plane crash. Rumfoord is a fervent patriot and an outspoken supporter of the Allied
firebombing of Dresden. He is, like Roland Weary, yet another example of the delusional belief in the
romance of war and humanity's ability to control the uncontrollable.
Tralfamadorians
The alien race that kidnaps Billy Pilgrim are from the planet Tralfamadore. Although never represented as
individuals, the Tralfamadorians provide the philosophy of time and free will that underlies the novel.
Kilgore Trout
Kilgore Trout is a science fiction novelist and Billy Pilgrim's favorite writer. He lives in Ulium and supports
himself by delivering newspapers. Billy meets Trout for the first time in 1964 and befriends him. Trout
represents yet another way of trying to cope with the absurd tragedy of human existence. Some critics have
also seen him as a projection of Vonnegut's own anxieties about being typecast as a science fiction writer.
Both Trout and his novels are mentioned in other Vonnegut novels.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
One of the unusual aspects of Slaughterhouse−Five is that its author appears as a character in his own novel.
Vonnegut appears throughout the first and last chapters, where he discusses his difficulty in writing the novel
and his visit back to Dresden some twenty years after his imprisonment there.
Roland Weary
Weary is one of the three other soldiers captured with Billy Pilgrim after the Battle of the Bulge. He is a
sadistic bully who despises Billy and whose hobbies include collecting instruments of torture. He imagines
Character Analysis
47
that there is great camaraderie between him and the two scouts with whom he and Billy are lost, but the scouts
eventually abandon both Weary and Billy. Weary dies of gangrene on the train to Dresden, blames Billy for
his death, and asks other soldiers to avenge him. Weary's aggressively violent nature and delusional belief in
the romance of war represent the militarism and hatred that Vonnegut is condemning in the novel.
Montana Wildhack
Montana is a twenty−year−old American movie star who is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians to be a mate
for Billy Pilgrim during his captivity. She and Billy have a child while they are being kept by the
Tralfamadorians.
» Back to Section Index
» Back to Table of Contents
Essays and Criticism
1. War in Slaughterhouse−Five
2. Time, Uncertainly, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Reading of Slaughterhouse−Five
3. Pilgrim's Dilemma: Slaughterhouse−Five
War in Slaughterhouse−Five
In the following essay, the author explains how Slaughterhouse−Five represents Vonnegut's efforts to come to
terms with his personal war experiences. Other aspects of the novel are of secondary concern when compared
to Vonnegut's anti−war theme.
In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., had already published five novels and two short story collections, but he was not
especially well known or commercially successful. The publication of Slaughterhouse−Five in that year was
an artistic and commercial breakthrough for Vonnegut. According to the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the
leading authorities on Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse−Five was Vonnegut's "first bestseller. [It] catapulted him to
sudden national fame, and brought his writing into serious intellectual esteem." Other critics have noted the
novel as a summation of many of the themes of Vonnegut's work: the dangers of unchecked technology, the
limitations of human action in a seemingly random and meaningless universe, and the need for people, adrift
in an indifferent world, to treat one another with kindness and decency. Almost thirty years later,
Slaughterhouse−Five remains Vonnegut's most discussed and widely admired novel.
Many critics and scholars have suggested that Vonnegut's breakthrough in Slaughterhouse−Five occurred
because here, for the first time, he addressed directly the pivotal event of his own life. While serving in the
U.S. Army during World War II, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans and, while a prisoner of war,
witnessed the firebombing of the German city of Dresden—an "open city" with no significant military targets.
On the night of February 13, 1945, Allied bombers dropped incendiary bombs on Dresden, creating a
firestorm that destroyed the city and killed an estimated 135,000 people, almost all of them civilians. This was
nearly twice the number of people killed by the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Dresden
bombing remains the single heaviest air strike in military history.
Vonnegut's effort to come to terms with such an overwhelming—and, in the view of many historians,
Essays and Criticism
48
unnecessary−—catastrophe took the form of a novel with a highly unusual structure. Rather than employing a
conventional third−person "narrative voice," Slaughterhouse−Five is narrated by the author himself. The first
chapter consists of Vonnegut discussing the difficulties he had in writing the novel, and Vonnegut himself
appears onstage as a character several times later in the book. In a sentence directed to his publisher,
Vonnegut said of the novel, "It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent
to say about a massacre."
The novel's "short and jumbled and jangled" structure reflects the condition of its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim.
Like Vonnegut, Billy is taken prisoner by the Germans and witnesses the Dresden firebombing. Billy's
response, however, is not to write a novel but to become "unstuck in time." Beginning during this captivity
behind German lines, Pilgrim finds himself liable at any time, suddenly and without warning, to travel to any
given moment in his own past or future. Although the novel follows Billy's war experiences in more or less
chronological order, a scene of Billy in a German prison camp may be followed immediately by a scene of his
wedding night, or a time when his father taught him to swim as a child.
Billy's condition is, on one level, a symbol of the shock, confusion, dislocation, and desire for escape that
result from the horrible experiences of war. His time travels could, perhaps, be interpreted as the delusions of
an emotionally unstable man. It is important to remember, however, that several of Vonnegut's earlier novels,
such as Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, and Cat's Cradle, were science fiction novels. Billy's time travel
may be symbolic, but it may also be interpreted as an actual event, an example of science fiction's ability to
make metaphors concrete.
The most overtly science−fictional element in Slaughterhouse−Five is, of course, Billy's abduction by aliens
from the planet Tralfamadore on his daughter's wedding night many years after the war. In using an alien
civilization as a vehicle for commenting on humanity, Vonnegut is again using the traditions of science
fiction. The Tralfamadorians also appear in Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan. During his captivity on
Tralfamadore—where he is displayed naked in a cage and, eventually, mated with a movie actress from Earth
named Montana Wildhack − Billy learns of the aliens' philosophy of time and death. It is a philosophy that
explains his own condition.
For Tralfamadorians, time is not a linear progression of events, but a constant condition− "All moments, past,
present, and future, always have existed, always will exist." Like Billy, the aliens can travel back and forth to
different moments in time. They do not consider death a significant event, since when a person dies he or she
"is still very much alive in the past." Billy does, in fact, know when he is going to die, and is unconcerned. At
the moment of his death, he finds himself returning to an earlier point in his life. The Tralfamadonan response
to death is "So it goes"— a phrase Vonnegut writes at every point in the novel where death is mentioned. All
beings exist in each moment of time like "bugs in amber," and there is nothing that can alter that fact: "Only
on Earth is there any talk of free will." Accordingly, the Tralfamadorians advise Billy "to concentrate on the
happy moments of life, and to ignore the unhappy ones."
Such a philosophy can, of course, lead to being passive and resigned rather than trying to oppose evil and
make the world better. Some critics have noted this tension in the novel and worried that it could be read not
as moral outrage but as, in the words of the critic Tony Tanner, "culpable moral indifference." A possible
answer to this charge may be found in one of Vonnegut's direct comments to his readers: "There are almost no
characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and
so much the listless playthings of enormous forces." There are certainly characters and dramatic situations in
Slaughterhouse−Five, but the characters are fragile, wounded people at the mercy of forces completely
beyond their control.
Those characters who claim to have some degree of control are, almost without exception, clueless, or cruel,
or both. Roland Weary, the soldier who torments Billy while they wander behind enemy lines, believes he is a
Essays and Criticism
49
great warrior. Along with the two scouts with whom he and Billy find themselves, he considers himself one of
"The Three Musketeers," a closely−bound fighting unit. In fact, Weary is a sadistic, incompetent bully whom
the experienced scouts abandon. "Wild Bob," a colonel on the prison train with Billy, delivers a speech in
which he assures his nonexistent troops that they have the Germans on the run and invites the troops to a
reunion in his hometown after the war: "If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!" Shortly
thereafter, "Wild Bob" dies of pneumonia. The British prisoners of war, who make a great show of thriving in
adverse conditions, owe their prosperity to a clerical error which causes the Red Cross to send them extra
supplies. Years after the war, Billy shares a hospital room with Bertrand Copeland Rumfoord, an Air Force
historian who has no patience with "bleeding hearts" and tries to convince Billy that the Dresden raid was
justified. Billy responds by quoting another person with delusions of control: "'If you're ever in Cody,
Wyoming,' said Billy Pilgrim behind his white linen screens, 'just ask for Wild Bob.'" Confronted by the
inexplicable horrors of war, and by a world in which people like Weary and Wild Bob and Rumfoord find
glory in wholesale death and destruction, Billy's passivity is, perhaps, understandable.
Slaughterhouse−Five is, then, not an answer to the tragedy of war, but a response. The novel's innovative
structure, distinctive prose style, and skilled use of humor and satire have all been much commented upon by
critics. But it is the horror of war, as represented by the Dresden firebombing, and the attempts of decent
people to come to terms with those horrors, that lie at the heart of the book and provide its most memorable
scenes. One such scene is when the American POW's emerge from the meat locker under
Slaughterhouse−Five to see the charred wreckage left after the bombing:
... the survivors, if they were going to continue to survive, were going to have to climb over
curve after curve on the face of the moon.... The curves were smooth only when seen from a
distance. The people climbing them learned that they were treacherous, jagged things....
Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead.... There were to be no moon men
at all.
Slaughterhouse−Five was published during the height of the Vietnam War, a point in history when many
Americans were beginning to think their country had made a terrible mistake. It is perhaps no surprise that a
novel which faced head−on the horrors of war (and American responsibility for some of those horrors), while
at the same time suggesting that the only proper response to these horrors was to maintain a degree of ironic
distance while being kind to victims, struck such a chord with the reading public and made its author a
cultural icon. That Vonnegut's novel has remained a classroom staple is a tribute to both its artistic
achievement and the power of its message. Slaughterhouse−Five is, in the words of Tony Tanner, "a masterly
novel" of "clarity and economy—and compassion."
Source: F. Brett Cox, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998.
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Time, Uncertainly, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Reading of Slaughterhouse−Five
In the following excerpt, the author examines the author−as−character, and the distancing and buffers set up
by Vonnegut as self−protection.
Carefully read, Chapter One [of Slaughterhouse−Five] emerges as a functional and illuminating part of the
novel as a whole. For the chapter contains passages that suggest three important facts crucial to a proper
Time, Uncertainly, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Reading of Slaughterhouse−Five
50
understanding of Vonnegut's novel: (1) the novel is less about Dresden than about the psychological impact of
time, death, and uncertainty on its main character; (2) the novel's main character is not Billy Pilgrim, but
Vonnegut; and (3) the novel is not a conventional anti−war novel at all, but an experimental novel of
considerable complexity.
Billy Pilgrim, the putative protagonist of Slaughterhouse−Five, does not even appear in this chapter. Instead,
the focus is on Vonnegut, the author−as−character. Emerging is a portrait of the artist as an aging man, "an
old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown." He is a man of nostalgia who makes
late−night drunken phone calls to almost−forgotten acquaintances, calls that seldom make connection. He
reminisces about his days as a university student and police reporter in Chicago, as a public relations man in
Schenectady, and as a soldier in Germany. The wartime memories, particularly as they concern the mass
deaths at Dresden, especially haunt his reveries and of course form the basis of plot for the subsequent nine
chapters.
Yet for one so apparently obsessed with the fleeting nature of time—he even quotes Horace to that
effect—Vonnegut seems at times curiously vague and indefinite about time. He cannot remember the exact
year he visited O'Hare and, upon returning to bed after a night of drinking and telephoning, cannot tell his
wife, who "always has to know the time," what time it is. "Search me," he answers. His forgetfulness seems a
shield, a defense against a medium that oppresses him.
The Vonnegut of Chapter One appears simultaneously obsessed with and oppressed by time, the past, and
death—particularly death. His preoccupation with death is reflected in the various figures he employs in
Chapter One and throughout the novel. Among the most prominent of these is the flowing−frozen water
metaphor. Vonnegut has used this motif before, especially in Cat's Cradle, when ice−nine, dropped
accidentally into the ocean, ossifies everything liquid. But it recurs in a subtler though perhaps more pervasive
way in Slaughterhouse−Five. Early in the novel, Vonnegut, on his way to visit Bernard V. O'Hare in
Philadelphia, crosses the Delaware, then appropriates the river as a metaphor in his reflections upon the nature
of time. "And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much of it was mine
to keep." Even before this association of time and the river, however, Vonnegut associates death with ice,
frozen water. "Even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers," he writes, "there would still be plain old death."
Extending this metaphor throughout the novel, Vonnegut repeatedly portrays living humanity as water
flowing, dead humanity as water frozen. "They were moving like water," he describes a procession of Allied
POW's, "... and they flowed at last to a main highway on a valley's floor. Through the valley flowed a
Mississippi of humiliated Americans." One of the POW's, a hobo, is dead, therefore "could not flow, could not
plop. He wasn't liquid anymore." Later, Billy Pilgrim sees the dead hobo "frozen stiff in the weeds beside the
track," his bare feet "blue and ivory," the color of ice. The phrase "blue and ivory" occurs seven times in
Slaughterhouse−Five, twice to describe the frozen feet of corpses, five times to describe the feet of Billy
Pilgrim, who, though still in the land of the flowing, is marked as mortal.
A similar figure applies to Vonnegut himself. Twice in Chapter One he refers to his breath as smelling of
"mustard gas and roses." The phrase appears again in Chapter Four when Billy Pilgrim receives a misdialed
phone call from a drunk whose breath, like the drunken "telephoner" of Chapter One, smells of mustard gas
and roses. The full implication of the image becomes clear only on the next−to−the−last page of the novel. In
the "corpse mines" of Dresden, as the dead bodies begin to rot and liquify, "the stink (is) like roses and
mustard gas." Like Billy Pilgrim's "blue and ivory" feet, Vonnegut's breath marks him as mortal. This, the
image suggests, is what time does to us all, not only when we lie dead like the Dresden corpses, but while we
breathe. Life is a state of gradual but perpetual decay.
Time, then, is the enemy harrowing the brow of the first character we meet in the novel. It is important to
recognize that the Vonnegut of Chapter One is, indeed, a character in Slaughterhouse−Five. Of course he is
very much like Vonnegut the author, has the same experiences, but he remains nonetheless the
Time, Uncertainly, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Reading of Slaughterhouse−Five
51
author−as−character. Moreover, he becomes the first−person narrator for the remainder of the novel, a fact
obscured by the Billy Pilgrim plot, which is often read as the novel proper rather than the
novel−within−the−novel−proper. Vonnegut−as−character introduces himself in Chapter One, informs us of
his procedures in gathering materials for his novel, and confesses the difficulties he has had over the past
twenty−three years in writing his story. Then, starting with Chapter Two, he begins narrating his novel, that
is, the novel by the author−as−character within the novel by Vonnegut the author.
It is not until the Tenth and final chapter that Vonnegut−as−character again "appears." He has not changed
much since Chapter One. He again remembers conversations with O'Hare, he is still confused about time,
placing the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King only a month apart; and he still harbors
thoughts of death. The most significant aspect of this chapter, however, is that in describing the Dresden
"corpse mines" the narrator shifts for the first time in the novel to first person plural:
Now Billy and the rest were being marched into the ruins by their guards I was there O'Hare
was there. We had spent the past two nights in the blind innkeeper's stable. Authorities had
found us there They told us what to do. We were to borrow picks and shovels and crowbars
and wheelbarrows from our neighbors. We were to march with these implements to such and
such a place in the ruins, ready to go to work. (italics added)
The shift in number insists, however subtly, that the story just related is not merely Billy Pilgrim's story, but
the narrator's as well. He, too, had suffered capture and malnutrition and the devastating firebombing. He,
too, worked in the corpse mines and saw a friend shot for "plundering" a teapot from the ruins.
And so, we realize, did Vonnegut the author. Indeed, many autobiographical similarities linking Billy Pilgrim
to his "creator," Vonnegut−as−character, extend even more to Vonnegut himself. Both Pilgrim and Vonnegut
were born in 1922, had fathers who hunted, are tall; both were captured in Luxembourg during the Battle of
the Bulge, were sent to Dresden, where they stayed in Schlachthoffunf, worked in a plant that manufactured
malt syrup for pregnant women; both survived the Dresden holocaust and helped dig up the corpses
afterwards; both were discharged in 1945, returned to college, and were married soon afterwards. Billy thus
becomes a dual persona, a mask not only for Vonnegut−as−character (who is already a mask of sorts for
Vonnegut), but for Vonnegut the author as well. Vonnegut has thus removed himself at least twice from the
painful Dresden experience. By including himself as a character in his own novel, he achieves the distance
that must exist between author and first person narrator, no matter how autobiographically based that narrator
is. The further inclusion of Billy Pilgrim as protagonist of the novel−within−the−novel removes Vonnegut yet
another step from the scenes he is recreating.
Nowhere is this need for distance more evident than when Vonnegut relates the actual firebombing itself.
Since this scene constitutes the novel's raison d'etre, one might expect an extended and graphic presentation.
The scene, however, is not only brief, but is couched in indirection, layered with multiple perspectives. At
least one reviewer has criticized the scene's failure to describe more fully the Dresden catastrophe. But
Vonnegut did not see the firebombing, he heard it, from within Slaughterhouse−Five. So does Billy Pilgrim.
He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds
like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high explosive bombs. The giants walked and
walked. A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like
outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was fire−storm out
there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that
would burn.
Most significant about this scene is not its indirection, however, but the fact that it is a remembered scene. For
the first time in the novel, Billy Pilgrim remembers a past event rather than time−travelling to it. Time−travel,
Time, Uncertainly, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Reading of Slaughterhouse−Five
52
it seems, would have made the event too immediate, too painful. Memory, on the other hand, supplies a
twenty−year buffer. But if the firebombing, only indirectly witnessed, was distressing, the totally devastated
city confronted the following day by the one hundred prisoners and then: four guards must have been almost
overwhelming. To relate that scene Vonnegut−as−narrator requires even more distance than memory can
provide. So the scene is revealed through a story Billy remembers having told Montana Wildhack on
Tralfamadore.... Vonnegut−as−character removes himself as much as possible from the scene he narrates,
cushioning it with multiple perspectives, constructing what is finally a story within a memory within a novel.
(Vonnegut the author removes himself yet one step further, achieving a story within a memory within a novel
within a novel.) Moreover, before relating this important scene, Vonnegut−as−narrator withdraws to the
protective fantasy of Tralfamadore. Only from the perspective of that timeless planet can he at last come to
artistic terms with a scene that has haunted him for twenty−three years.
Source: Charles B. Harris, "Time, Uncertainly, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr: A Reading of Slaughterhouse−Five,"
in Centennial Review, Summer, 1976, pp. 228−43.
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Pilgrim's Dilemma: Slaughterhouse−Five
In the following excerpt, the author discusses Billy Pilgrim, focusing on the causes of his breakdown and how
he is influenced by Tralfamadorianism.
The reader's central problem in comprehending Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse−Five lies in correctly
understanding the source of Billy Pilgrim's madness. Vonnegut continually undercuts our willing suspension
of disbelief in Billy's time travel by offering multiple choices for the origin of Billy's imbalance: childhood
traumas, brain damage from his plane crash, dreams, his shattering war experiences, and plain old fantasy. Yet
if, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, only a "first−rate intelligence" has the "ability to hold two opposed
ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function," an inquiry into the two opposed
philosophical systems that Pilgrim holds in his mind—Tralfamadorianism and Christianity—may lead us to
the fundamental cause of Billy's breakdown. Clearly, Billy is no "first−rate intelligence," and he hardly can be
said to "function"; he simply cracks under the strain of his dilemma. For some critics, however, Vonnegut's
method of juxtaposing two explanatory systems, seemingly without affirming one or the other, becomes a
major flaw in the novel.... I would argue that, on the contrary, Vonnegut's position is clear; he rejects both
Tralfamadorianism and divinely oriented Christianity, while unambiguously affirming a humanly centered
Christianity in which Jesus is a "nobody," a "bum," a man.
In the autobiographical first chapter, Vonnegut introduces the opposed ideas, which the narrative proper will
develop, evolving from his twenty−three−year attempt to come to terms with the horror of Dresden. The
Christmas card sent to Vonnegut's war buddy by a German cab driver, expressing his hope for a "world of
peace and freedom ... if the accident will," dramatizes, in miniature form, a central tension in the novel.
Human history is either divinely planned—Christmas signifies God's entrance into human history—and
historical events are meaningful, or human history is a series of random events, non−causal, pure "accident,"
having no ultimate meaning as the Tralfamadonans claim. Both viewpoints deny free will; man is powerless
to shape events.... Either position allows one serenely to wash his hands of Dresden. Billy Pilgrim washes his
hands, so to speak, and becomes reconciled to his Dresden experience under the tutelage of the
Tralfamadorians: "'[Dresden] was all right,' said Billy. 'Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly
what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore.'"
Pilgrim's Dilemma: Slaughterhouse−Five
53
The Tralfamadonans provide Billy with the concept of nonlinear time, which becomes the foundation for a
mode of living: "'l am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it
moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.'" Although men on
earth are always "'explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or
avoided,'" Billy learns that '"there is no why.'"
In short, Tralfamadorianism is an argument for determinism. Yet, this is a determinism without design, where
chance rules. The universe will be destroyed accidentally by the Tralfamadorians, and wars on earth are
inevitable.... The upshot of the Tralfamadorian philosophy finds expression in a cliche: "Everything was
beautiful, and nothing hurt."
When Billy, full of revelations, returns to Earth "to comfort so many people with the truth about time," the
implications of Tralfamadorianism become apparent. Although Billy's first attempt to "comfort" someone, a
Vietnam war widow's son, fails, Billy blossoms into a charismatic national hero at the time of his
assassination in 1976. The public appeal of Tralfamadorianism is obvious. Simply, it frees man from
responsibility and from moral action. If all is determined, if there is no why, then no one can be held
accountable for anything, neither Dresden nor My Lai. In his personal life, Billy's indifference and apathy
toward others are clearly illustrated. Chapter Three offers three consecutive examples of Billy's behavior: he
drives away from a black man who seeks to talk with him; he diffidently listens to a vicious tirade by a
Vietnam Hawk at his Lions Club meeting; he ignores some cripples selling magazine subscriptions. Yet the
Tralfamadonan idea that we can do nothing about anything fully justifies Billy's apathy. When Billy preaches
this dogma as part of his "calling," he does a great service for the already apathetic by confirming their
attitude; he provides them with a philosophical base for their apathy. If one ignores the ghetto or the Vietnam
War, neither exists. By exercising one's selective memory, by becoming an ostrich, one may indeed live in a
world where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. Perfect. No wonder Billy is a successful Comforter; he
has fulfilled Eliot Rosewater's request that "new lies" be invented or "people just aren't going to want to go on
living."
If Tralfamadorianism is a "new lie," it recalls an "old lie"—God. There is little difference between God's will
and accident's will in the novel. For Vonnegut, man's belief in an all−powerful Creator, involved in human
history, has resulted in two great evils: the acceptance of war as God's will; the assumption that we carry out
God's will and that God is certainly on our side, which justifies all atrocities. Sodom, Gomorrah, Hiroshima,
Dresden, My Lai IV—all victims of God's will. Vonnegut directs his rage in Slaughterhouse−Five at a
murderous, supernatural Christianity that creates Children's Crusades, that allows men to rationalize butchery
in the name of God, that absolves men from guilt. Since, for Vonnegut, all wars are, finally, "holy" wars, he
urges us to rid ourselves of a supernatural God.
While Vonnegut indicts Tralfamadorianism and supernatural Christianity as savage illusions, he argues in
Slaughterhouse−Five for a humanistic Christianity, which may also be an illusion, but yet a saving one.
Throughout the novel, Vonnegut associates Billy Pilgrim with Bunyan's Pilgrim and with Christ. A chaplain's
assistant in the war with a "meek faith in a loving Jesus," Billy finds the war a vast Slough of Despond; he
reaches Dresden, which "looked like a Sunday school picture of Heaven to Billy Pilgrim," only to witness the
Heavenly City's destruction. Often, Vonnegut's Christian shades into Christ Himself. During the war, Billy
hears "Golgotha sounds," foresees his death and resurrection, " 'it is time for me to be dead for a little
while—and then live again,'" identifies himself fully with Christ: "Now his snoozing became shallower as he
heard a man and a woman speaking German in pitying tones. The speakers were commiserating with
somebody lyrically. Before Billy opened his eyes, it seemed to him that the tones might have been those used
by the friends of Jesus when they took His ruined body down from His cross." After his kidnapping in 1967
by the Tralfamadorians, Billy assumes the role of Messiah: "He was doing nothing less now, he thought, than
Pilgrim's Dilemma: Slaughterhouse−Five
54
prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy
believed, because they could not see as well as his little green friends on Tralfamadore." Vonnegut has created
a parody Christ whose gospel is Tralfamadorian, who redeems no one, who "cried very little although he often
saw things worth crying about, and in that respect, at least, he resembled the Christ of the carol." Indeed,
Pilgrim's dilemma is that he is a double Savior with two gospels—a weeping and loving Jesus and a
Tralfamadorian determinist. His opposed gospels drive him mad, render him impotent, result in his crackpot
letters to newspapers and in his silent weeping for human suffering. Possibly Billy could have resolved his
dilemma if he had paid closer attention to the human Christ in the novels of Billy's favorite writer—Kilgore
Trout.
While Vonnegut often mentions Trout's books and stories for satiric purposes, Trout, "this cracked messiah"
who has been " 'making love to the world'" for years, also serves as Vonnegut's spokesman for a humanistic
and naturalistic Christianity. In Trout's The Gospel from Outer Space, a planetary visitor concludes that
Christians are cruel because of "slipshod storytelling in the New Testament," which does not teach mercy,
compassion, and love, but instead: "Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected."
Trout's visitor offers Earth a new Gospel in which Jesus is not divine, but fully human—"a nobody." When
the nobody is crucified: "The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the
bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe
throughout all eternity." What Vonnegut suggests here is that Christ's divinity stands in the way of charity. If
the "bum" is Everyman, then we are all adopted children of God; we are all Christs and should treat each other
accordingly.
As mentioned earlier, both Tralfamadorian determinism and the concept of a Supreme Being calling every
shot on Earth nullify human intention, commitment and responsibility. But Vonnegut's humanistic
Christianity in the face of a naturalistic universe demands moral choice—demands that we revere each other
as Christs, since all are sons and daughters of God. Not surprisingly, Vonnegut's position echoes that of
Stephen Crane.... The correspondent's insight that we are all in the same boat adrift in an indifferent sea, and
that once we realize that we have only each other, moral choice is "absurdly clear," is Kurt Vonnegut's insight
as well. (Vonnegut mentions The Red Badge of Courage.) The courage, sacrifice, and selflessness in The Red
Badge appear in Slaughterhouse−Five also.
While Vonnegut offers several versions of ideal brotherhood in his works—the Karass, the Volunteer Fire
Department, and, despite Howard W. Campbell, Jr.'s assessment of American prisoners, moments of
brotherhood in Slaughterhouse−Five—he also suggests an alternative for the individual, a slogan that
becomes a way of living. On the same page where Vonnegut says, "Billy was not moved to protest the
bombing of North Vietnam, did not shudder about the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do,"
appears the following prayer and Vonnegut's comment:
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
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
The Serenity Prayer, sandwiched between episodes concerning Vietnam, is Vonnegut's savage indictment of
Billy Pilgrim. In short, Billy lacks the "wisdom" to see that Dresden is of the past and cannot be changed, but
that the bombing of North Vietnam lies in the present and can be changed However, to protest the bombing
Pilgrim's Dilemma: Slaughterhouse−Five
55
requires moral "courage," a quality obviated by his Tralfamadorian education.
The seemingly innocuous Serenity Prayer, the motto of Alcoholics Anonymous, appears once more in a most
significant location—on the last page of Chapter Nine. The truth of Raymond M. Olderman's observation in
his Beyond the Waste Land that "Vonnegut is a master at getting inside a cliche'" is verified when we consider
that Vonnegut has transformed the AA motto into a viable moral philosophy. Vonnegut knows that we have to
accept serenely those things that people cannot change—the past, linear time, aging, death, natural forces. Yet
the Prayer posits that, through moral courage, there are things that can be changed. War, for example, is not a
natural force like a glacier, as Harrison Starr would have it. While Billy believes that he cannot change the
past, present, or future, Vonnegut suggests that in the arena of the enormous present, we can, with courage,
create change: "And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine
to keep."
If there is a broad moral implication in Slaughterhouse−Five, it is aimed at America. Vonnegut, like his
science fictionist Kilgore Trout, "writes about Earthlings all the time and they're all Americans." Vonnegut's
message for America is this: America has adopted the Tralfamadonan philosophy, which justifies apathy. We
have lost our sense of individuality; we feel powerless, helpless, and impotent; we consider ourselves the
"listless playthings of enormous forces." What Vonnegut would have us do is develop the wisdom to
discriminate between what we can or cannot change, while developing the courage to change what we can.
We have met Billy Pilgrim and he is us.
Source: David L. Vanderwerken, "Pilgrim's Dilemma: Slaughterhouse−Five," in Research Studies, Vol. 42,
No. 3, September, 1974, pp 147−52
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Suggested Essay Topics
Chapter 1
1. Explain why Vonnegut has chosen to make this chapter the first of Slaughterhouse−Five rather than
making it a preface.
2. Describe three different attitudes toward war described in this chapter. Who best epitomizes each view?
How would you fit your own view into this scheme?
Chapter 2
1. Explain the Tralfamadorian concepts of time and death.
How do they compare to the Earthling understanding of these ideas? Why might Billy think that explaining
the Tralfamadorian understanding of these two things might help his fellow Earthlings?
2. Examine Billy’s hallucinations and time travelling experiences while he is a soldier. How do they
illuminate his mental state? How do they compare to the fantasies of Roland Weary?
Chapter 3
1. Despite the fact that Billy is a prisoner of the Nazis, their actions are far more humane than the norm for
World War II literature. Why does Vonnegut choose to depict the Nazis in this fashion? Compare the German
soldiers to the Americans. How do their differences and similarities affect the message Vonnegut is trying to
convey?
Suggested Essay Topics
56
2. Explain the symbolic role of the hobo in this chapter.
Chapter 4
1. Examine the repetitive imagery of Slaughterhouse−Five. What is its structural role in the novel? Choose
two repeating images and discuss their symbolic role.
2. Discuss the meaning of the backwards movie Billy watches while he waits for the flying saucer’s arrival.
What do Billy’s extrapolations add to the role of this film in the book?
Chapter 5
1. It has been said that Slaughterhouse−Five is written in a circular pattern. Find evidence to substantiate this
claim within the text. How would you describe the structure of this novel?
2. Does Billy appear to be maturing or changing over the course of his life? Discuss his character as shown by
the novel. If Billy is not changing, what is moving the text?
Chapters 6 and 7
1. Discuss the religious imagery in Slaughterhouse−Five. Is Billy supposed to be a Christ figure? What is the
purpose of the numerous references to Adam and Eve?
2. The comment that Billy dreamed true things after his brain surgery is highly relevant in the interpretation of
Billy’s time travel experiences. What does it mean when the text says that his time travel experiences are true?
How does this affect your interpretation of the underlying time structure of this novel and Billy’s reliability as
an interpreter of reality?
Chapter 8
1. Discuss the books of Kilgore Trout summarized in this
chapter. How do they add to and support the themes of Slaughterhouse−Five?
2. Trace the sequence of Billy’s time travels in this section. Although is not supposed to be controlling them,
what psychological desires might be motivating his transfers?
Chapters 9 and 10
1. The meaning of the bird’s chirp at the end of Slaughterhouse−Five is a matter of much debate. How do you
interpret it? Is it the embodiment of the “moral” of this novel?
2. Discuss Billy’s experiences on Tralfamadore. What do they say about Billy’s unmet psychological needs?
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Sample Essay Outlines
The following paper topics are designed to test your understanding of the book as a whole and analyze
important themes and literary devices. Following each question is a sample outline to help you get started.
Topic #1
The argument that the message of Slaughterhouse−Five is to withdraw from the world has occasionally been
predicated on the assumption that Vonnegut believes man is essentially evil. What view does
Slaughterhouse−Five take of the nature of man—that we are good, evil, or amoral? How does the
Sample Essay Outlines
57
firebombing of Dresden fit in to your conclusion?
Outline
I. Thesis Statement: Although Slaughterhouse−Five depicts man as naturally good, the military’s code of
amorality strips away natural compassion.
II. Humane actors
A. Edgar Derby
B. German civilians
C. German soldiers at rail yard
III. Cruel actors
A. “Rabid” Paul Lazzaro
B. German soldier at prison camp
C. Bertram Rumfoord
IV. Dresden
A. Residents are sympathetic
B. Lack of morality in Trout’s The Gutless Wonder
C. Bombing only possible when sympathy “circuits” are cut
Topic #2
Vonnegut’s characters have been described as flat. Accepting the hypothesis that this is an authorial decision
designed to emphasize the ideas of the text, delineate the symbolic roles of three of the lesser characters of
Slaughterhouse−Five.
Outline
I. Thesis Statement: Valencia Pilgrim, Edgar Derby, and Bertram Rumfoord each serve primarily symbolic
roles within Slaughterhouse−Five.
II. Valencia
A. Obsessed with silver pattern when Billy is hospitalized
B. Makes little attempt to understand her husband
C. Wants party guests to admire her ring
D. Symbol of shallowness and materialism in American culture
III. Edgar Derby
A. Pulls strings to get into army
B. Unfailingly kind to everyone
C. Stands up to Campbell
D. Gets shot for petty theft
E. Symbol of good, but mistakenly based patriotism and injustice of war
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Compare and Contrast
1940s: World War II was a decisive victory for the United States and its allies and was widely supported by
Americans. Americans' knowledge of the war came from delayed accounts in newspapers, on radio, and in
Compare and Contrast
58
newsreels shown in movie theaters. By the end of the war, the United States was the top military and
economic power in the world.
1960s: American involvement in the Vietnam War eventually lost the support of most citizens, perhaps in part
because of extensive television news coverage, which brought the realities of war into American living rooms.
The war concluded in 1975 with the United States withdrawing from Vietnam—the only war America ever
lost. While still the "leader of the free world," the Vietnam War deals a strong blow to American prestige
around the world.
Today: The United States most recent military conflict, the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, was an
overwhelming victory, in part because of American determination to avoid "another Vietnam." The war
enjoyed widespread support among Americans. However, media coverage was carefully controlled by the
military. Although the end of the Cold War after the collapse of the Soviet Union left America as the only true
"superpower," its economic supremacy is being challenged by countries like Japan, China, and Germany.
There is a reluctance within the U.S. government and the populace to commit U.S. troops to military conflicts
overseas.
1940s: Before the first wave of UFO sightings begins in 1947, popular awareness of "aliens from outer space"
was mostly confined to the readers of pulp science fiction magazines.
1960s: The U.S. Air Force reports almost three thousand UFO sightings between 1965 and 1967;
congressional hearings on the issue are held in 1966. The science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s,
television shows such as "Star Trek" and "The Invaders," and the American space program all dramatically
increase public awareness of the possibility of life on other planets.
Today: Claims of "alien abductions" become almost commonplace. Popular television shows and movies,
such as The X−Files and Independence Day, and extraordinary public events, such as the Heaven's Gate mass
suicide, in 1997, bring public awareness of the UFO phenomenon to all all−time high. The first planets
outside the solar system have been discovered, and scientists, led by such astronomers as the late Carl Sagan,
now seriously speculate about the possibilities of life on other planets.
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Topics for Further Study
Research the Dresden, Germany, firebombing of World War II and compare Vonnegut's account of the event
with the historical record.
Research the history of UFO sightings in the United States and compare Billy Pilgrim's experience with the
Tralfamadorians to actual reported sightings and "abductions."
Compare and contrast Slaughterhouse−Five with another well−known novel of war, such as The Red Badge
of Courage or All Quiet on the Western Front.
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Topics for Further Study
59
Media Adaptations
Slaughterhouse−Five was adapted for the screen by writer Stephen Geller and director George Roy Hill in
1972. The film stars Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim, Ron Leibman as Paul Lazzaro, and Valerie Perrine as
Montana Wildhack. Available on MCA/Universal Home Video.
The novel is also available in abridged form as a sound recording, read by the author, on Harper Audio, 1994.
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What Do I Read Next?
Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s 1952 novel, also deals with the limitations of science and technology.
The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is Stephen Crane's classic story of the Civil War that, like Vonnegut's
novel, portrays the horrors of war in an unromanticized fashion.
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) is a classic novel of World War I that, like
Vonnegut's novel, portrays German soldiers as ordinary people caught up in the horrors of war.
Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) was one of the first major American novels based on its
author's experiences in World War II.
Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (1978) was one of the first major American novels based on its author's
experiences in Vietnam.
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is another example of science fiction as social criticism.
Vonnegut's 1962 novel, The Sirens of Titan, also features the Tralfamadorians.
Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon (1966) uses both science fiction devices and an unusual narrative
structure to tell a story of alienation and displacement.
More Than Human (1953) is the most famous novel by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, whom some
have cited as a model for Kilgore Trout, Jr.
Venus on the Half−Shell was published in 1975 with Vonnegut's permission as a science fiction novel by
"Kilgore Trout, Jr." It was actually written by Philip Jose Farmer, a well−known science fiction writer who for
much of his career, like Trout, wrote visionary works for little financial gain or popular recognition.
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Bibliography and Further Reading
Sources
Allen, William Rodney. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1991.
Media Adaptations
60
Brian Aldiss with David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, Victor Gollancz,
1986.
Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1994 (1989).
Thomas D. Clareson, Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period
(1926−1970), University of South Carolina Press, 1990.
J. Michael Crichton, review of Slaughterhouse−Five, in New Republic, April 26, 1969.
Richard Giannone, Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels, Kennikat Press, 1977, pp 82−97.
Granville Hicks, "Literary Horizons," in Saturday Review, March 29, 1969, p. 25.
Jerome Klinkowitz, Kurt Vonnegut, Methuen, 1982, pp. 63−69.
Jerome Klinkowitz, Slaughterhouse Five: Reforming the Novel and the World, Twayne, 1990.
Jerome Klinkowitz, and John Somer, eds. The Vonnegut Statement. New York: Delacorte/Lawrence, 1973.
Jerome Klinkowitz and Donald L. Lawler, editors, Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and
Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1977.
Loeb, Monica. Vonnegut’s Duty−Dance with Death: Theme and Structure in Slaughterhouse−Five. Sweden:
Umea Universite¬tsbib¬liotek, 1979.
James Lundquist, Kurt Vonnegut, Frederick Ungar, 1977, pp 69−84.
Merrill, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989.
Mustazza, Leonard, ed. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Schatt, Stanley. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
Robert Scholes, review of Slaughterhouse−Five, New York Times Book Review, April 6, 1969, pp. 1, 23.
Tony Tanner, City of Words, Harper & Row, 1971, pp 194−201.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse−Five. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1969.
For Further Study
Clark Mayo, Kurt Vonnegut: The Gospel from Outer Space; or, Yes We Have No Nirvanas, Borgo Press,
1977, pp. 45−52.
Discusses Slaughterhouse−Five as a response to "the horror and absurdity of war" with emphasis on the
novel's unconventional structure.
Leonard Mustazza, Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Bucknell
University Press, 1990, pp. 102−15.
Discusses Slaughterhouse−Five in terms of Billy Pilgrim's attempts "to construct for himself an Edenic
experience" and the "linkage between Eden and Tralfamadore."
Media Adaptations
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Peter J. Reed, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Crowell, 1972, pp. 172− 203.
Discusses Slaughterhouse−Five as "an effort to bring together all that Vonnegut has been saying about the
human condition and contemporary American society." Reed calls the novel "remarkably successful" and
"one of Vonnegut's best."
Stanley Schatt, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., G.K. Hall, 1976, pp. 81−96.
A detailed summary and critique of the novel. The book also contains an extensive bibliography of critical
works on Vonnegut.
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Media Adaptations
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