Slaughter House Five Essay

Chapter 3
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
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Weary and Billy’s captors, a small group of German irregulars, take their valuables and discover an obscene photograph in Weary’s pocket. As Billy lies in the snow, he sees an image of Adam and Eve in the polished boots of the commander. Weary must surrender his boots to a young German soldier, whose wooden clogs he receives in exchange. The two Americans are brought to a house full of other captives. Billy falls asleep and wakes up in 1967, in the middle of administering an eye examination. We learn that he has been falling asleep at work lately. He finishes with the patient and tries unsuccessfully to interest himself in an optometry article.
Billy closes his eyes and is once more a prisoner. He is roused and ordered to move. He joins a steady stream of POWs marching in the road outside. A German war photographer stages a capture scene of Billy emerging from a bush, surrendering to armed Germans. Billy slips back into 1967. He is driving on his way to a Lions Club luncheon through Ilium’s black ghetto, still smoldering from recent riots, and then through a section gutted for urban renewal. The destruction he sees outside the car reminds him of the scene after the firebombing of Dresden. He drives a Cadillac with John Birch Society bumper stickers. His son, Robert, is a Green Beret in Vietnam. His daughter, Barbara, is about to get married. He is quite wealthy.
At the Lions Club meeting, a marine major speaks about bombing in North Vietnam. Billy has no opinion on this subject. He has a plaque on his office wall that helps guide him through such listlessness. It reads: “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.”
After the luncheon, Billy returns to his stately home. He lies down for a nap and finds himself weeping. A bed vibrator called “Magic Fingers,” purchased to help Billy fall asleep, jiggles him while he weeps. He closes his eyes and is back in Luxembourg, marching. The wind makes his eyes water. Weary marches ahead of him, his feet raw and bloody from his ill-fitting clogs. The prisoners march into Germany and are taken to a railroad yard. A mentally unstable colonel who has lost his whole regiment asks if Billy is one of his men. The colonel, who likes to be called “Wild Bob,” tells Billy, “If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!” The soldiers are sorted by rank and placed in crowded boxcars. They must take turns sleeping and standing, and they pass a helmet as a chamber pot. Billy is separated from Weary. His train does not move for two days. When the train begins to roll toward the interior, Billy travels to the night he is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians.
Chapter 4
There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost smell his breath—mustard gas and roses.
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On the night of his daughter’s wedding day, Billy cannot sleep. Because he has traveled in time already, he knows he will be kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians’ flying saucer in an hour. Billy gets out of bed by the light of a full moon and wanders down the hallway and into his daughter’s empty bedroom. The phone rings, and Billy hears the voice of a drunk who has dialed the wrong number. He can almost catch the scent of mustard gas and roses on the man’s breath.

Downstairs, Billy picks up a half-empty bottle of champagne from a table. He watches a late-night documentary on American bombers and their gallant pilots in World War II. Slightly unstuck in time, Billy watches the movie forward and backward. Planes fly backward, magically quelling flames, drawing their fragmented bombs into steel containers, and sucking them back up into their bellies. Guns on the ground suck metal fragments from the pilots, crew, and planes. Weapons are shipped backed to factories, where they are carefully disassembled and broken down into their constituent minerals. The minerals are shipped to specialists all over the world who “hide them cleverly” in the ground, “so they never hurt anybody ever.” In Billy’s mind, Hitler becomes a baby and all of humanity works toward creating two perfect people named Adam and Eve.
Billy heads out to the backyard to meet the saucer that will arrive soon. A sound like a melodious owl heralds the arrival of the spacecraft, which is 100 feet in diameter. Once on board, Billy is asked if he has any questions. He asks, “Why me?”—a question that his captors think very typical of earthlings to ask. They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.
Billy is then anesthetized. The crush of the spaceship’s acceleration sends him hurtling through time. He is back on a boxcar traveling across Germany. The men take turns sleeping and standing. No one wants to let Billy sleep beside him because Billy yells and kicks in his sleep. He thus sleeps standing up.
By the ninth day of the boxcar journey, people are dying. Roland Weary, who is in another car, dies after making sure that everyone in the car knows who is responsible for his death: Billy Pilgrim. A car thief from Cicero, Illinois, named Paul Lazzaro swears he will make Billy pay for causing Weary’s death.
On the tenth night, the train reaches its destination: a prison camp. The prisoners are issued coats, their clothes are deloused, and they are led to a mass shower. Among the prisoners is Edgar Derby, a forty-four-year-old teacher from Indianapolis. When the water begins to flow in the shower, Billy time-travels to his infancy. His mother has just given him a bath. He is then a middle-aged optometrist playing golf with three other optometrists. He sinks a putt, bends down to pick it up, and is back on the flying saucer. He asks where he is and how he got there. A voice reiterates that he is trapped in a blob of amber. He is where he is because the moment is structured that way, because time in general is structured that way—because it could not be otherwise. The voice, which is Tralfamadorian, comments that only on Earth is there talk of free will.
Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.
Chapter 5
Summary
There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages. . . . There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral. . . .
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In his zoo enclosure, Billy reads the novel Valley of the Dolls, the only earthling book available. He learns that Tralfamadorian books are composed of short telegram-like clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy skips back to two childhood scenes during a family tour of the American West, then to the prison camp in Germany. After the prisoners are showered and their clothes are deloused, their names are entered in a ledger, and they are officially alive again.
The Americans are housed with a group of British officers who have accidentally received extra provisions. The Brits welcome the Americans with a cheerful banquet but quickly become disgusted with the sorry state of the enlisted men. During a performance of Cinderella, Billy laughs uncontrollably and is taken to the camp’s “hospital.” He is drugged and wakes up in 1948, in the mental ward of a veterans’ hospital in New York.
Billy has committed himself to the mental ward in his last year of optometry school. In the aftermath of war, he finds life meaningless. In the bed next to him lies an ex-captain named Eliot Rosewater. Eliot introduces Billy to the clever but poorly written science-fiction novels of a writer named Kilgore Trout. Billy’s mother visits him, and he covers his head with a blanket.
Back in Germany, Edgar Derby keeps watch over Billy’s sickbed. Billy remembers Derby’s death by firing squad, which happens in the near future. Billy travels back to the veterans’ hospital. His -fiancée, Valencia Merble, is visiting. They discuss Kilgore Trout with Rosewater.
Billy time-travels to his geodesic dome in the zoo on Tralfamadore, outfitted with Sears Roebuck furniture and appliances. The Tralfamadorians tell Billy that there are actually seven sexes among humans, all of which are necessary for reproduction. Since five of these sexes are active only in the fourth dimension, Billy cannot perceive them. When Billy praises the peacefulness of Tralfamadore, the aliens inform him that Tralfamadorians are at war sometimes and at peace at others. They add that they know how the universe will end: one of their pilots will accidentally blow it up. It always happens the same way and that is how the moment is structured. They state that war cannot be prevented on Tralfamadore any more than it can on Earth.
Billy skips back to his wedding night with Valencia in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. After they make love, Valencia asks Billy about the war. He gets up and goes to the bathroom and finds himself back in his hospital bed in the prison camp. Billy wanders to the latrine, where the American soldiers are violently sick. One of them is Kurt Vonnegut.
The next morning, Paul Lazzaro appears at the hospital, knocked unconscious after trying to steal from an Englishman. A German major reads aloud a monograph on the pathetic state of American soldiers by Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American playwright turned Nazi propagandist.
Billy falls asleep and wakes up in 1968, back at work on his letter -to the paper. His daughter, Barbara, scolds him, notices that it is cold in the house, and leaves to call the oil-burner man after putting Billy to bed. Lying under his electric blanket, Billy travels to Tralfamadore, just as an actress named Montana Wildhack arrives and goes into hysterics. She has been brought to Tralfamadore to be Billy’s mate. Eventually she grows to trust him, and soon they are sleeping together.
Billy wakes up in 1968, having just had a wet dream about Montana Wildhack. The next day, Billy examines a boy whose father has been killed in Vietnam. He shares Tralfamadorian insights with the boy, whose mother realizes that Billy is insane. Billy’s daughter is called to take him home.
Chapter 6
Summary
After spending the night on morphine, Billy wakes at dawn in his prison bed on the day he and the other Americans are to be transported to Dresden. He senses something radiating energy near his bed and discovers the source of this “animal magnetism”: two small lumps inside the lining of his overcoat. A telepathic communication informs him that the lumps can work miracles for him if he does not try to find out any more about them.
Billy dozes off and wakes again later the same morning. With him are Edgar Derby and Paul Lazzaro. The English officers are building themselves a new latrine, having abandoned the old one to the sick Americans. The Englishman who beat up Lazzaro stops by, and Lazzaro tells him that he is going to have the officer killed after the war. The sweetest thing in life, he claims, is revenge. He says that one time he fed a dog that had bitten him a steak filled with sharp pieces of metal and watched it die in torment. Lazzaro reminds Billy of Roland Weary’s final wish and advises him not to answer the doorbell after the war.
Billy says he already knows that he will die because an old, crazed Lazzaro will keep his promise. He has time-traveled to this moment many times, and he knows that he will be a messianic figure by that time, delivering a speech about the nature of time to a stadium crowd of admirers and granting them solace by sharing the understanding that moments last forever and that death is a negligible reality. He speaks at a baseball park covered by a geodesic dome. It is 1976, and China has dropped a hydrogen bomb on Chicago. The United States has been divided into twenty nations to prevent it from threatening the world. Moments after he predicts his own death and closes his speech with the words “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello,” Billy is killed by an assassin’s high-powered laser gun. He experiences the violet nothingness of death, and then he swings back into life and to early 1945. The record of these events, Billy says, he has recorded on a cassette that he has left in a safe-deposit box in a bank.
After a lecture on personal hygiene by an Englishman and an election in which Edgar Derby is named their leader, the Americans are shipped to Dresden. Arrayed in his fur-satin coat and swathed in cloth scraps and silver boots left over from the production of Cinderella, Billy looks like the war’s unwitting clown. When the boxcars open, the Americans gaze on the most beautiful city they have ever seen. “Oz,” says Kurt Vonnegut, who is in the boxcar too. Eight sorry, broken-down German soldiers guard one hundred American prisoners. They are marched through the city to a former slaughterhouse that will serve as their quarters. Billy is amazed by Dresden’s architecture. The city is relatively untouched by war, with industries and recreational facilities still operating. All the citizens are amused by the ragtag parade, except one, who finds Billy’s -ridiculous appearance offensive. The man is insulted by Billy’s lack of dignity and his apparent reduction of the war to a joke or pageant.
Chapter 7
Summary
Nearly twenty-five years after his experience in Dresden, Billy boards a chartered plane with twenty-eight other optometrists, including his father-in-law, headed for a trade conference in Montreal. Valencia waves goodbye from the tarmac while eating a candy bar. The narrator informs us that, according to the Tralfamadorians, Valencia and her father, like every other animal and plant, are both machines. Billy knows that the plane will crash. A barbershop quartet of optometrists called the Four-eyed Bastards serenades the passengers with bawdy tunes. One of them is a Polish song about coal miners, which makes Billy remember a public hanging he witnessed in Dresden in which a Polish man was lynched for having sex with a German woman.

Billy dozes off and drifts back to a moment in 1944. Roland Weary is shaking him; Billy tells the Three Musketeers to go on without him.
The plane crashes into Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont, and Billy survives with a fractured skull. Austrian ski instructors wearing black ski masks arrive on the scene. As they check for signs of life, Billy whispers “Schlachthof-fünf” (“Slaughterhouse-Five” in German), a phrase he learned in Dresden in order to communicate the address of his prison if he got lost. The ski instructors transport Billy down the mountain on a toboggan. A famous neurosurgeon operates on him, and Billy remains unconscious for two days. The narrator tells us that Billy’s convalescence is filled with dreams, some of them involving time travel. He goes back to Dresden and his first evening at the slaughterhouse, when he, Edgar Derby, and their young German guard Werner Gluck accidentally open a door onto a shower room full of beautiful naked girls. This incident marks the first glimpse of female nudity that Billy and Gluck have ever had. The three men finally make it to their intended destination, the prison kitchen. The cook regards their sorry condition and declares, “All the real soldiers are dead.”
Another Dresden time trip after his plane accident takes Billy to a factory that manufactures malt syrup. The POWs work there making the molasses-like concoction intended to serve as a nutritional supplement for pregnant women. All the malnourished prisoners who work at the factory secretly eat the syrup themselves, scooping it out of vats with spoons hidden in every corner of the building. Billy takes his first spoonful on his second day at work, and his scrawny body shivers with “ravenous gratitude.” Billy hands a syrupy spoon through a window to Edgar Derby, who is working outside. Upon tasting the syrup, Derby bursts into tears of joy. Chapter 8
Summary
Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the American Nazi propagandist, speaks to the weary, malnourished prisoners at the slaughterhouse. He solicits them to join his Free American Corps to fight on the Russian front, promising food and repatriation after the war. Edgar Derby stands up and, in his finest moment, denounces Campbell. He defends the American fight for freedom and praises the brotherhood between Russians and Americans. An air-raid siren concludes the confrontation, and everyone takes shelter in a meat locker carved into the bedrock beneath the slaughterhouse. The alarm is false. The narrator states that Dresden will not be destroyed until the next night.
Billy dozes off in the meat locker and travels back to a conversation with his exasperated daughter, Barbara. She blames Kilgore Trout for Billy’s Tralfamadorian pronouncements. Billy recalls the first time he mets Trout in his own hometown of Ilium. Trout manages newspaper delivery boys for the Ilium Gazette. He is shocked that Billy has read his books. Billy invites Trout to his eighteenth wedding anniversary celebration, where Trout is a hit with the optometrists and their wives. One of them, the credulous and attractive Maggie White, listens with concern as Trout leads her to believe that publishing made-up stories qualifies as a fraud punishable by God and worthy of jail time. In his enthusiasm, Trout accidentally spits a piece of salmon roe into Maggie’s cleavage.
The Four-eyed Bastards (or Febs), the barbershop quartet made up of optometrists, sing a sentimental song about old friendship. The experience of watching and listening to them visibly shakes Billy. Trout guesses that Billy has looked through a “time window.” When the barbershop quartet sings again, Billy has to leave the room. He goes upstairs, where he accidentally walks in on his son in the bathroom holding a guitar as he sits on the toilet. Billy lies down on his bed, trying to figure out why the Febs have such an effect on him. He remembers the night Dresden was destroyed. The American prisoners and four guards waited out the bombing in the meat locker. They emerged to find Dresden replaced by one big, smoking mineral deposit. The four guards huddled together, and the changing expressions on their faces—silent mouths open in awe and terror—seem to Billy like a silent film of a barbershop quartet.
Billy time-travels to Tralfamadore, where Montana Wildhack, who is six months pregnant, asks him to tell her a story. He tells her of the destruction of Dresden and of the little burned logs lying all around that were actually people. In bombed-out Dresden, the guards and the prisoners venture out onto the moonscape to forage for food and water. In the city itself they do not encounter another living soul. At nightfall, they reach an inn in a portion of a suburb untouched by bombs or flames. The blind innkeeper and his family know that Dresden has been destroyed. They give the prisoners soup and beer and a stable to sleep in for the night. As the prisoners prepare for bed, the innkeeper says in German, “Good night, Americans. Sleep well.”
Summary
A hysterical Valencia drives to the hospital where Billy is recovering from the plane crash. She hits another car on the way and drives from the scene of the accident without a functioning exhaust system. She pulls up in front of the hospital and passes out from carbon monoxide poisoning. Her face is bright blue. She dies one hour later.
Billy is unconscious, time-traveling and oblivious to his wife’s passing. In the next bed, an arrogant Harvard history professor named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord is recovering from a skiing accident. Rumfoord is the official Air Force historian, and he is working on a condensed history of the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. He has to write a section on the smashing success of Dresden’s bombing, despite the fact that some of his sources characterize it as an unnecessary carnage.
When Billy first regains consciousness, everyone thinks the accident has left him a vegetable. But behind his catatonic facade he is preparing to tell the world about Tralfamadore and to explain the true nature of time. Billy tells Rumfoord that he was in Dresden for the firebombing, but the professor doesn’t want to listen. Billy then travels back to a May afternoon in Dresden, two days before the end of the war.
Many Germans have fled because they heard that the Russians were coming. Billy and a few other prisoners find a green, coffin-shaped wagon hitched to two horses, and they fill it with food and souvenirs. Outside the slaughterhouse, Billy remains in the wagon and dozes in the sun. It is a happy moment in his life. The sound of a middle-aged German couple talking about the horses awakens him. The animals’ mouths are bleeding, their hooves are broken, and they are dying of thirst. Billy has been oblivious to their poor condition until now. The couple makes Billy get out and look at the animals, and he begins to cry his first tears of the war.
Back in the hospital the next day, Rumfoord quizzes Billy about Dresden. Billy’s daughter, Barbara, arrives and takes him home. She places him under the care of a live-in nurse. Billy’s message cannot wait any longer. He sneaks out and drives to New York City to tell the world about Tralfamadore.
Once in the city, Billy goes to Times Square. He sees four Kilgore Trout books in the window of an adult bookstore and goes in to read them. One of the books is about an earthling man and woman who are kidnapped by aliens and taken to a zoo on a faraway planet. While inside the shop, Billy glimpses the headline of a pornographic magazine: “What really became of Montana Wildhack?” He also sees a few seconds of a pornographic movie starring a teenaged Montana.
There happens to be a radio station near Billy’s hotel. Claiming to be a writer from theIlium Gazette, Billy gets on a talk-show panel of literary critics discussing the state of the novel. Billy waits his turn, then speaks about Tralfamadore and Montana Wildhack and the nature of time. He is escorted to the street and makes his way back to his hotel. There he falls asleep and time-travels back to Tralfamadore, where Montana is breast-feeding their child. She says that she can tell that Billy has been time-traveling. A silver locket hanging between her bare breasts bears the same inscription—the Serenity Prayer—as the plaque in Billy’s optometry office.
Chapter 10
Summary
It is 1968. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. are both dead, assassinated within a month of one another. Body counts from the jungle war in Vietnam fill the evening news.
According to Billy, Tralfamadorians are more interested in Darwin than in Jesus Christ. They admire the Darwinian view that death serves a function and that “corpses are improvements.” A Kilgore Trout book,The Big Board,features aliens who capture an earthling and ask him about Darwin and golf.
Vonnegut tells us that he is not overjoyed if what Billy learned from the Tralfamadorians about eternal existence is true. Still, he is grateful for all the pleasant times experienced in his life. Vonnegut recalls one of those moments—his return to Dresden with his war buddy O’Hare. On the plane, the men eat salami sandwiches and drink white wine, and the author’s friend shows him a book that claims the world population will reach seven billion by the year 2000. “I suppose they will all want dignity,” Vonnegut remarks.
Billy is also back in Dresden, two days after the war, digging for bodies. Vonnegut and O’Hare are there too. After spending two nights in the stable, the prisoners are put to work excavating the ruins of Dresden, where they discover innumerable “corpse mines.” The bodies rot faster than they can be removed, making for a grisly cleanup job. One prisoner, a Maori, dies of the dry heaves. Eventually, as the pace of putrefaction outstrips the recovery efforts, the authorities adopt a new policy. The bodies are cremated where they lie in subterranean caverns. The soldiers use flamethrowers to carry out this grim task.
During the course of the excavations, while the men are still under German command, Edgar Derby is discovered with a teapot found in the ruins. He is arrested and convicted of plundering, then executed by firing squad.
Soon it is spring, and the Germans disappear to fight or flee the Russians. The war ends. Trees sprout leaves. Billy finds the horses and the green, coffin-shaped wagon. A bird says to him, “Poo-tee-weet?”