Slaughterhouse Five Summary

Slaughterhouse Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a decidedly non-heroic man who has become "unstuck in time." He travels back and forth in time, visiting his birth, death, all the moments in between repeatedly and out of order. The novel is framed by Chapters One and Ten, in which Vonnegut himself talks about the difficulties of writing the novel and the effects of Dresden on his own life. In between, Billy Pilgrim's life is given to us out of order and in small fragments. For the sake of clarity, this short summary will put Billy's life in chronological order, although in the novel every chapter spans events over the course of many years. Billy is born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. He grows into a weak and awkward young man, studying briefly at the Ilium School of Optometry briefly before he is drafted. After minimal training, he sent to Europe right in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. He is captured behind German lines; before his capture is the first time he gets unstuck in time. Billy and the other American POWs are temporarily shipped to a camp full of dying Russians and a few pampered British officers. The Americans then are moved to Dresden, a beautiful German city that has no major industries and no significant military presence. No one expects Dresden to be bombed. But in the span of one night in February of 1945, Dresden is bombed until almost nothing is left. 130,000 people die. Billy and the other POWs wait out the bombing in a meat cellar. The next day at noon, the come out and find a landscape that looks like the surface of the moon. With no food or water, the POWs and four guards trek out to the suburbs. The American prisoners stay in an innkeepers stable for a while, but soon the authorities round up POWs to excavate the city for bodies. When that work is over, Billy and the other men return to the stable to wait out the rest of the war. In May, Russians take the area and Billy is repatriated. He goes back to Ilium to finish optometry school. After getting engaged to the daughter of the school's owner, Billy has a mental breakdown and is committed to a veteran's hospital. There, he is introduced to the science fiction of Kilgore Trout by a fellow patient. After he is release, he marries Valencia as planned. Her father is wealthy, and with a little help from him, Billy grows rich. Billy and Valencia have two children. On the night of his daughter's wedding, Billy (as he claims) is kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians exist in the fourth dimension, and consquently they have a completely different view of time. For them, all moments happen simultaneously and always. They take him to their world and put him in a zoo, where he mates with an actress called Montana Wildhack. Using a time warp, they return him to a earth almost immediately after the moment that he left, so no one notices that he has been missing for months. He says nothing about the events until he suffers head injuries in a plane crash. His wife dies almost immediately afterward. After he goes home, he runs off to New York and goes on a radio talk show to talk about his alien abduction experiences and the Tralfamadorian concept of time. His daughterBarbara, just twenty-one years old, suddenly motherless and with a father who appears to be mentally unbalanced, takes care of Billy but feels a great deal of resentment and frustration. Billy claims to know how he will die. In 1976, after the U.S. is split into petty nations and Chicago is hydrogen-bombed "by angry chinamen," Billy is killed by a high-powered laser gun.

Plot Overview

NOTE: Billy Pilgrim, the novels protagonist, has become unstuck in time. He travels between periods of his life, unable to control which period he lands in. As a result, the narrative is not chronological or linear. Instead, it jumps back and forth in time and place. The novel is structured in small sections, each several paragraphs long, that describe various moments of his life.

Billy Pilgrim is born in 1922 and grows up in Ilium, New York. A funny-looking, weak youth, he does reasonably well in high school, enrolls in night classes at the Ilium School of Optometry, and is drafted into the army during World War II. He trains as a chaplains assistant in South Carolina, where an umpire officiates during practice battles and announces who survives and who dies before they all sit down to lunch together. Billys father dies in a hunting accident shortly before Billy ships overseas to join an infantry regiment in Luxembourg. Billy is thrown into the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and is immediately taken prisoner behind German lines. Just before his capture, he experiences his first incident of timeshifting: he sees the entirety of his life, from beginning to end, in one sweep. Billy is transported in a crowded railway boxcar to aPOW camp in Germany. Upon his arrival, he and the other privates are treated to a feast by a group of fellow prisoners, who are English officers who were captured earlier in the war. Billy suffers a breakdown and gets a shot of morphine that sends him timetripping again. Soon he and the other Americans travel onward to the beautiful city of Dresden, still relatively untouched by wartime privation. Here the prisoners must work for their keep at various labors, including the manufacture of a nutritional malt syrup. Their camp occupies a former slaughterhouse. One night, Allied forces carpet bomb the city, then drop incendiary bombs to create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen into the blaze, asphyxiating or incinerating roughly 130,000 people. Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight meat locker. They emerge to find a moonscape of destruction, where they are forced to excavate corpses from the rubble. Several days later, Russian forces capture the city, and Billys involvement in the war ends. Billy returns to Ilium and finishes optometry school. He gets engaged to Valencia Merble, the obese daughter of the schools founder. After a nervous breakdown, Billy commits himself to a veterans hospital and receives shock treatments. During his stay in the mental ward, a fellow patient introduces Billy to the science fiction novels of a writer named Kilgore Trout. After his recuperation, Billy gets married. His wealthy father-in-law sets him up in the optometry business, and Billy and Valencia raise two children and grow rich. Billy acquires the trappings of the suburban American dream: a Cadillac, a stately home with modern appliances, a bejeweled wife, and the presidency of the Lions Club. He is not aware of keeping any secrets from himself, but at his eighteenth wedding anniversary party the sight of a barbershop quartet makes him break down because, he realizes, it triggers a memory of Dresden. The night after his daughters wedding in 1967, as he later reveals on a radio talk show, Billy is kidnapped by two-foot-high aliens who resemble upside-down toilet plungers, who he says are called Tralfamadorians. They take him in their flying saucer to the planet Tralfamadore, where they mate him with a movie

actress named Montana Wildhack. She, like Billy, has been brought from Earth to live under a transparent geodesic dome in a zoo where Tralfamadorians can observe extraterrestrial curiosities. The Tralfamadorians explain to Billy their perception of time, how its entire sweep exists for them simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When someone dies, that person is simply dead at a particular time. Somewhere else and at a different time he or she is alive and well. Tralfamadorians prefer to look at lifes nicer moments. When he returns to Earth, Billy initially says nothing of his experiences. In 1968, he gets on a chartered plane to go to an optometry conference in Montreal. The plane crashes into a mountain, and, among the optometrists, only Billy survives. A brain surgeon operates on him in a Vermont hospital. On her way to visit him there, Valencia dies of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning after crashing her car. Billys daughter places him under the care of a nurse back home in Ilium. But he feels that the time is ripe to tell the world what he has learned. Billy has foreseen this moment while time-tripping, and he knows that his message will eventually be accepted. He sneaks off to New York City, where he goes on a radio talk show. Shortly thereafter, he writes a letter to the local paper. His daughter is at her wits end and does not know what to do with him. Billy makes a tape recording of his account of his death, which he predicts will occur in 1976 after Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by the Chinese. He knows exactly how it will happen: a vengeful man he knew in the war will hire someone to shoot him. Billy adds that he will experience the violet hum of death and then will skip back to some other point in his life. He has seen it all many times.

Slaughterhouse-Five Summary
How It All Goes Down It's hard to summarize the plot of Slaughterhouse-Five because everything is going on at the same time. Since the main character, Billy Pilgrim, travels through time, we jump from 1944 to 1967 to Billy's childhood and back again. We're going to try to keep this summary at least somewhat chronological, but bear in mind that the only way you'll be able to get a sense of the crazy detours and switchbacks that characterize the novel is by reading it. (And, of course, you can also consult our "Detailed Summary" if you get confused along the way.) Slaughterhouse-Five starts with the narrator. He never officially announces, "Hello, I am Kurt Vonnegut," but he is clearly speaking as Vonnegut. He talks about the difficulty he has trying to find ways to write about his experiences in Dresden duringWorld War II, and he makes references both to teaching at the University of Iowa's famous writing program and studying anthropology at the University of Chicago both of which Kurt Vonnegut did in real life. The narrator introduces us to the two people to whom the book is dedicated: Mary O'Hare and Gerhard Mller. For more on these two and their significance, check our "Characters" section. After this autobiographical intro, we get to the book itself, which stars a fairly pathetic young man named Billy Pilgrim. Billy is in optometry school (optometrists are the guys who fit you with glasses if you have eye problems) in upstate New York in 1944 when he gets drafted into the army. He isn't even a fully trained soldier; his job is to be the chaplain's assistant, leading his regiment in hymns to keep their spirits up. Nevertheless, despite his complete lack of suitability for war, Billy is deployed to Luxembourg in December 1944 to fight the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. Once Billy gets to the battlefield, he becomes utterly confused; he isn't even carrying a gun. He is left walking through enemy territory like a lost lamb until he gets picked up by another American recruit, a crazy bully with a love of torture implements named Roland Weary. Weary becomes so angry at Billy's lack of interest in saving his own life that he threatens to shoot him. Just as Weary is aiming at Billy, a group of German soldiers take both men prisoner. Weary winds up dying on the trek from Luxembourg to a prisoner of war (POW) camp in Germany, blaming Billy for his capture all the while. Billy arrives by train at a prison compound in the middle of a German death camp for Russian soldiers. The compound houses mainly British troops, who have all been prisoners since near the beginning of the war. These soldiers have been eating well and exercising for most of the war, so they're in great spirits and they're pretty disgusted by the state of the American recruits, especially weak, clownish Billy Pilgrim. It's in the British compound that Billy meets Edgar Derby, a high school teacher who will be shot at the end of the war for looting, and Paul Lazzaro, a total psycho who promises to send an assassin to kill Billy after the war for letting Roland Weary die. Billy and Edgar Derby are both sent to a POW center in Dresden, Germany, to wait out the war. This POW camp is located in an abandoned slaughterhouse (see "What's Up With the

Title?" for why this matters). Soon after they arrive in Dresden (on February 13, 1945), American bomber units attack the city, setting fires that end up consuming pretty much all of Dresden. Thousands of people die. (For more on the Dresden firebombing, check out "In a Nutshell.") Billy and a small group of his POW comrades have to climb through the ruins of buildings and bodies to find water and shelter. It's Billy's job, as a prisoner of war, to help dig bodies out of the rubble of the city. When Billy is finally freed, following the German surrender in May, 1945, he goes back to upstate New York and starts up optometry school again. He gets engaged to Valencia, the daughter of the school's owner. Then, suddenly, he has a nervous breakdown and checks himself into a veteran's hospital to recover. Supposedly, he does get better but after that, Billy will find himself suddenly crying, silently and without apparent reason. Flash forward about two decades and Billy has two children: a daughter, Barbara, and a son, Robert. Robert was kind of a wild kid as a teenager, but now he is a Marine fighting in Vietnam. Barbara well, we'll get to her in a minute. Billy and Valencia have been (mostly) happily married for twenty years when everything goes wrong. Billy gets into an airplane with his father-in-law, Lionel. The plane crashes into the side of a mountain in Vermont and everyone except Billy is killed. Billy suffers an intense skull fracture. While Billy recovers in the hospital, Valencia dies of carbon monoxide poisoning in her car. At the hospital, Billy rooms with an extremely energetic 70-year-old named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, who is recuperating from a broken leg he got on a ski trip with his 23year-old wife. Rumfoord is a historian who wants to write a book about the Air Force. He wants to include a blurb about Dresden, but he is frustrated because a lot of information about the raid is still classified. Rumfoord does not see why the Air Force won't tell the world about such a fantastic, successful raid. He thinks it's because they are worried about the opinions of a bunch of bleeding hearts who might disapprove of the burning deaths of 135,000 non-combatants. Billy tells Rumfoord that he was at Dresden during the firebombing. Rumfoord wants to convince Billy that the raid was absolutely necessary, no matter how terrible it was to experience on the ground. As Billy regains his ability to move around, he suddenly appears on a talk-radio show in New York talking about his experiences not as a POW but as an alien abductee. He writes to the local paper in his hometown to tell the world about the people of the planet of Tralfamadore. (We actually hear about Tralfamadore in the second chapter of the book, but chronologically, this takes place quite late in Billy's life.) Billy's aliens are green and shaped like toilet plungers. Billy explains that they took him and a young actress named Montana Wildhack to be part of a zoo exhibition the year before. The Tralfamadorians, Billy tells the public, have a lot to teach us about time. The Tralfamadorians see everything differently because their vision works in four dimensions. Thanks to this, they know that every moment in time is separate, eternal, and happening at the same time as every other moment. So when you see someone die, they may not be doing so well in that particular moment, but in all of the moments before then, they're still great. Death itself is an illusion, as is free will. Each point in time has always and will always be exactly the same. There is nothing we can do to change it, which, Billy

thinks, should be a comfort to all of us. Barbara, Billy's daughter, is incredibly embarrassed that he has announced all this in the newspaper, and insists on taking control of his life because he cannot care for himself anymore. It's probably not helping Billy's case for his own sanity that, during all of his arguments with Barbara and his experiences in the hospital, he keeps skipping in and out of time. His visits to Tralfamadore, his wartime captivity, and his life with his family all seem to be happening simultaneously. See, Billy is really receptive to the Tralfamadorian way of looking at things, because he has been disconnected from time since 1944. He has seen his own birth and death many, many times, so he is uniquely qualified to believe that each independent moment is its own complete world. After all, this is both how Billy experiences time and how the novel is told scene by scene in tiny chunks of narrative that only make sense when you look at them all at once. The novel ends with Billy digging through the rubble of Dresden to find bodies for cremation. After finishing his job, he and his POW pals are sent to a stable to wait out the rest of the war. When the war in Europe ends, the stable door opens. Outside, all is silence except for the sounds of the birds singing, "Poo-tee-weet?"