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Summary and Analysis of Slaughterhouse-Five
Based on the Book by Kurt Vonnegut
By Worth Books OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4402-8
CHAPTER 1
Summary
ONE
The narrator visits Bernard O'Hare, an old war buddy he knew in Dresden, to talk to him about the bombing and their experiences there. Claiming to have already written five thousand useless pages, he hopes the meeting will inspire his "Dresden book." O'Hare's wife, Mary, however, is displeased because she's afraid the narrator will write a story glorifying war, which will result in more "babies" being shipped off to die. When he tells her he has no such intention and plans to name the book, The Children's Crusade, she relents.
The narrator and O'Hare begin their journey to Dresden.
Need to Know: This chapter serves as a preface to the World War II bombing of Dresden and the author's presence at that event, as well as introducing the notion that the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, has come unstuck in time.
TWO
Chapter two begins the nonlinear narrative style that characterizes the rest of the novel. "Unstuck in time," Billy Pilgrim jumps seemingly at random to various events in his life, beginning in World War II and continuing until death, putting him in a state of constant anxiety about when and where he might jump to next.
Billy grows up in Ilium, New York, and serves in the Army in World War II. Later, he gets married, has two children, finishes his education, and starts a lucrative optometry business. His wife dies on the way to visit him in the hospital after surviving a plane crash. After his wife's death, his daughter, Barbara, takes it upon herself to care for him, treating him like a child most of the time. His entire postwar life is painted as the lifeless picture of suburban banality. Barbara thinks his tales of time-jumping and Tralfamadore are dangerous delusions.
In 1944, Billy is deemed too unfit for combat to join an infantry unit, so he's given the job of chaplain's assistant. He is never even issued a weapon. At the Battle of the Bulge, his unit is overrun, and he's trapped behind enemy lines. He finds himself in the company of Roland Weary and two scouts. His lack of fighting spirit leads Weary to bully and abuse him at every opportunity.
Billy first comes unstuck in time while on the run with Weary and the scouts. He returns to the day his father taught him to swim by throwing him in the deep end of a swimming pool; he had to be rescued. From there he makes a series of jumps: to 1965, when he visits his mother in a nursing home; to 1958, one of his son Robert's Little League games; to 1961, when he cheated on his wife at a New Year's Eve party and later passed out in his car; to 1945 again, begging Weary and the scouts to leave him behind; to 1957 when he's elected president of the Lions Club. Ultimately, the scouts leave Weary and Billy behind to be captured. In a fury, Weary beats Billy mercilessly until they are discovered by German soldiers.
Need to Know: This chapter roughs out the major eras of Billy's life: his early experiences in the Army, his postwar life, marriage, children, and career.
THREE
Billy makes several time-jumps between the day he and Weary are captured by German soldiers and the events in 1967.
The Germans take Weary's army boots and give him a pair of wooden clogs to wear. At a staging area, they join thousands of other American POWs in a march through Luxembourg toward Germany. The clogs ravage Weary's feet. Reaching a railyard, Billy encounters a dying American officer called Wild Bob. Wild Bob tells them that after the war, "If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!" This passage resonates in Billy's memory throughout the book. The POWs are crammed into boxcars, waiting for days to move. The POWs share food, take turns lying down, and pass their excrement in a silver helmet to the outside through a ventilation duct.
In 1967, Billy falls asleep examining a patient. He ponders his Cadillac, his business, his career. He's forgotten how old he is. Lurking just below the surface of his awareness are the terrible things he experienced in Germany. At a Lions Club luncheon, a Marine veteran gives a speech about the necessity of staying the course in Vietnam. Billy's son, Robert, is a Green Beret now, and Billy is proud of him. Billy goes home to take a nap — doctor's orders to assuage random bouts of weeping. His house is empty. His wife and daughter, Barbara, are out shopping for Barbara's wedding. He doesn't have a dog anymore. His Magic Fingers bed massages him as he weeps.
Need to Know: Billy's captivity in Germany scarred him in ways he cannot fathom, both after capture and on the long, humiliating march. These horrors contrast sharply with his life in 1967, a life of comfort and ordinariness, but even in the face of luxury, the war haunts him.
FOUR
On Barbara's wedding night, Billy is abducted by the Tralfamadorians. He asks them, "Why me?" To which they respond, "Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is..... There is no why." Billy asks about free will, but if not for studying Earthlings, the aliens would have no idea what "free will" is. Only on Earth do people speak of free will.
Back in the POW boxcar, Billy is ostracized by his fellows for the way he kicks and yells in his sleep, so he is forced to sleep standing up. The cramped, squalid conditions lead to several deaths, including Roland Weary, who dies of gangrene in his feet. With his dying breath, he blames Billy Pilgrim for killing him.
The train arrives at a prison camp, where the Germans give Billy a ridiculous fur-lined coat that is far too small.
He meets two Americans that had also just arrived: a strong, fit, middle-aged man named Edgar Derby; and Paul Lazzaro, a foul-tempered car thief. Lazzaro promised Roland Weary on his deathbed that he would have Billy Pilgrim killed after the war.
Need to Know: The Tralfamadorians challenge the idea that there is meaning to the cosmos; they raise one of the novel's central philosophical questions: Do we have free will, or are our lives fated? Back in the war, Billy is already traumatized by his experiences.
FIVE
The Tralfamadorians experience novels differently than humans, reading everything all at once because they experience all time simultaneously. There are no beginnings, middles, ends, morals, causes, or effects. They experience the "depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."
In the prison camp, the POWs encounter a band of British officers, who, through a Red Cross snafu, have received ten times their allotment of supplies, so they shower the incoming Americans with food and amenities. The British POWs are healthy, keeping up their spirits with a variety of makeshift theatrical productions. During their rendition of Cinderella, Billy suffers a breakdown and is placed in the camp hospital.
Jumping to 1948, Billy is in a veterans' hospital in a ward for nonviolent mental patients. There he meets Eliot Rosewater, another veteran, who introduces Billy to the science-fiction novels of Kilgore Trout. Trout becomes Billy's favorite author, igniting an obsession with reading the genre. Billy's fiancée, Valencia, visits him often. He doesn't want to marry her; he knew he was crazy simply by proposing.
On Tralfamadore, Billy is placed in a zoo. He talks to the aliens about the nature of time and the morality of war. The aliens admit their race ultimately destroys the universe in an experimental accident. They cannot change this event, nor are they willing to. It simply is. To alleviate Billy's loneliness, they bring him a companion, Montana Wildhack, a young, beautiful, adult film star. Billy and Montana have sex and conceive a child.
Jumping to his honeymoon with Valencia, Billy already knows that his marriage will be at least bearable, thanks to the time travel. By the end of the honeymoon, she's already pregnant with Robert. She asks him about his experiences in the war but he is reluctant to answer.
Back in WWII, all of the American POWs are violently ill from the British welcome feast. Meanwhile, a German officer reads to them from a monograph written by Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American Nazi. Campbell says America is a rich country but its people are poor and lack basic civil courtesies. American POWs are the dirtiest, the most ill-tempered, the most self-pitying, and incapable of seeing to their own welfare.
Then Barbara, his daughter, is admonishing him for all the outrageous letters he's been writing to the newspapers. She worries he may be going crazy.
Need to Know: The Tralfamadorians experience life as "the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time." It is how they are able to look past life's horrors. This becomes the way Billy experiences his life — a whole unit made of little vignettes.
SIX
Hidden inside the lining of Billy's ridiculous coat with the fur collar in the POW camp, he finds a large diamond. He later has the diamond made into a ring, with which he proposes to Valencia.
Paul Lazzaro intends to have Billy killed after the war, a promise made to Roland Weary as he died. Lazzaro expounds his list of enemies slated for revenge. Billy flashes forward to the moment of his death. (He's attending a UFO conference, and an assassin sent by Lazzaro shoots him in the head.)
Billy Pilgrim, Lazzaro, and Derby head to the theater where Cinderella had been staged. There, Billy finds a pair of combat boots painted silver for the play. They fit him like a glove.
The Americans are shipped by train to Dresden, the last remaining city in Germany that has not been bombed and burned. The bedraggled POWs are marched through the city to the gates of Schlachthof-fünf — Slaughterhouse-Five.
Need to Know: Billy's discovery of the diamond came from a strange, magnetic compulsion, which raises the question of free will. Is Billy's life already laid out for him, no matter what he does? The POWs' arrival at Slaughterhouse-Five presages horrors to come.
SEVEN
Billy survives a plane crash in Vermont. Before the aircraft hits a mountain, the barbershop quartet on the aircraft is singing a song. Hospitalized with a fractured skull and other injuries, Billy is comatose for two days after surgery, during which he dreams of time travel. His father-in-law dies in the crash (along with twenty-eight other optometrists and the pilot).
One of the guards at Slaughterhouse-Five is Werner Gluck, a boy from Dresden, armed with a single-shot musket and bayonet. The narrator informs us that, unbeknownst to them, Gluck and Billy are distant cousins. During the month leading up to the bombing, Billy and his fellow POWs do various jobs around Dresden, washing windows, floors, and lavatories, and working in a factory that makes malt syrup for pregnant women. Billy sneaks as many spoonfuls of the syrup as he can to stave off starvation.
Need to Know: The barbershop quartet forms a focal point of memory in Billy's life — a performance that resonates with tragedy and dredges up deep wells of suppressed trauma.
EIGHT
Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the American Nazi propagandist, visits Slaughterhouse-Five. He offers the POWs sumptuous meals if they join him, but Edgar Derby stands up and defies him, extolling the virtues of American democracy. The air-raid sirens blare.
Meanwhile, Billy is having an argument with his daughter about the terrible influence Kilgore Trout has had on him. Billy met Kilgore Trout in 1964. Billy recognizes him instantly and invites him to his and his wife's eighteenth-anniversary party. Trout attends the party, enjoying this rare bit of notoriety as a "real author." When the barbershop quartet starts singing, however, Billy experiences a visceral reaction of tortured grief. With concerted effort, he realizes the reason for his reaction is that, in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing, his four German guards, in shock, reminded him of a barbershop quartet.
Need to Know: The aftermath of the bombing is described with harrowing understatement. The entire city was gone, and that effect on Billy echoes throughout his life.
NINE
After the plane crash, Valencia rushes to be by Billy's side. On the way, she gets into a minor accident, which leaves her exhaust system on the roadside. When she arrives at the hospital, she falls unconscious and later dies of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Billy's hospital roommate is a retired Air Force general and Harvard professor named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. Rumfoord is writing a book about the Dresden bombing. Billy floats in and out of consciousness, often delirious in his stupor, which annoys Rumfoord to no end. Through Rumfoord's attractive but low-IQ wife, we get snippets from historical documents about the Dresden bombing, as well as the atomic bomb attacks on Japan. When Billy awakens sufficiently to assert that he was there, Rumfoord at first refuses to believe him.
Rumfoord asks about Billy's feelings on the bombing. Billy says, "It was all right. ... Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore."
In the rubble of Dresden, two days after the end of the war in Europe, Billy and a few Americans await the arrival of Allied forces. They find an abandoned horse-drawn wagon, which they use to ride around the deserted city looking for souvenirs. He is awakened from a nap to be scolded by two German civilians at the poor condition of the horses. He bursts into tears at the horses' plight, not having cried about anything else in the war.
Barbara takes Billy home from the hospital, but he sneaks away to New York City to get on television and tell the world about Tralfamadore. In a seedy used bookstore, he discovers several Kilgore Trout novels, one of which is about a man who's abducted from Earth and placed in a zoo.
He manages to get on a radio talk show, but after he goes off on a tangent about Montana Wildhack and flying saucers, he's escorted out of the building. Then he time-jumps to Tralfamadore for an idyllic liaison with Montana, where she's breastfeeding their child.
Need to Know: The only time in Billy's life that he's truly happy is when he is with Montana; this is all the more poignant because the reader cannot be sure it's real.
TEN
The narrator returns to reflect on the events of his life, and the trip he took with Bernard O'Hare to Dresden twenty years after the war.
We then see Billy among the rubble, digging for bodies, dragging them out of hundreds of "corpse mines." During one these excursions, the Germans arrest Edgar Derby for plundering — he took a teapot from the catacombs — and later shot by firing squad. So it goes. And birds keep on singing.
Need to Know: In chapter one, the narrator says Derby's execution is the climax of the book, and we are left with this idea: The novel's lone "heroic" character is executed for what seems an absurdly minor infraction. This underlines the meaninglessness of the universe that lies at the core of the novel.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Slaughterhouse-Five by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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