Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is a 1969 semi-autobiographic science fiction–infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. It follows the life experiences of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years, to his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during World War II, to the post-war years. Throughout the novel, Billy frequently travels back and forth through time. The protagonist deals with a temporal crisis as a result of his post-war psychological trauma. The text centers on Billy's capture by the German Army and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, an experience that Vonnegut endured as an American serviceman. The work has been called an example of "unmatched moral clarity"Powers, Kevin, "The Moral Clarity of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ at 50", The New York Times, March 23, 2019, Sunday Book Review, p. 13. and "one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time". The book has been translated into at least 11 other languages, including German (twice), Italian (twice), French, Polish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, and Chinese.
Plot The novel's first chapter begins with "All this happened, more or less"; this introduction implies that an unreliable narrator tells the story. Vonnegut utilizes a non-linear, non-chronological description of events to reflect Billy Pilgrim's psychological state. Events become clear through flashbacks and descriptions of time travel experiences.Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. 2009 Dial Press Trade paperback edition, 2009, p. 1 In the first chapter, the narrator describes his writing of the book, his experiences as a University of Chicago anthropology student and a Chicago City News Bureau correspondent, his research on the Children's Crusade and the history of Dresden, and his visit to Cold War–era Europe with his wartime friend Bernard V. O'Hare. In the second chapter, Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim, an American man from the fictional town of Ilium, New York. Billy believes that an extraterrestrial species from the planet Tralfamadore held him captive in an alien zoo and that he has experienced time travel.
As a chaplain's assistant in the United States Army during World War II, Billy is an ill-trained, disoriented and fatalistic American soldier who discovers that he does not like war and refuses to fight.Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. 2009 Dial Press Trade paperback edition, 2009, p. 43 He is transferred from a base in South Carolina to the front line in Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge. He narrowly escapes death as the result of a string of events. He also meets Roland Weary, a patriot, warmonger, and sadistic bully who derides Billy's cowardice. The two of them are captured in 1944 by the Germans, who confiscate all of Weary's belongings and force him to wear wooden clogs that cut painfully into his feet; the resulting wounds become gangrenous, which eventually kills him. While Weary is dying in a rail car full of prisoners, he convinces a fellow soldier, Paul Lazzaro, that Billy is to blame for his death. Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life."
At this exact time, Billy becomes "unstuck in time"; Billy travels through time to moments from his past and future. The novel describes the transportation of Billy and the other prisoners into Germany. The German soldiers held their prisoners in the German city of Dresden; the prisoners had to work in "contract labor" (forced labor); these events occurred in 1945. The Germans detained Billy and his fellow prisoners in an empty slaughterhouse called ("slaughterhouse five"). During the Allied bombing of Dresden, German guards hid their captives in the partially underground setting of the slaughterhouse; this protected those captives from complete annihilation. As a result, they are among the few survivors of the firestorm that raged in the city between February 13 and 15, 1945. After V-E Day in May 1945, Billy was transferred to the United States and received an honorable discharge in July 1945.
Billy is hospitalized with symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder and placed under psychiatric care at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Lake Placid. During Billy's stay at the hospital, Eliot Rosewater introduces him to the work of an obscure science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. After his release, Billy marries Valencia Merble, whose father owns the Ilium School of Optometry that Billy later attends. Billy becomes a successful and wealthy optometrist. In 1947, Billy and Valencia conceive their first child, Robert, on their honeymoon in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Two years later, their second child, Barbara, was born. On Barbara's wedding night, Billy is abducted by a flying saucer and taken to a planet many light-years away from Earth called Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians have the power to see in four dimensions; they simultaneously observe all points in the space-time continuum. They universally adopt a fatalistic worldview: death means nothing to them, and their typical response to hearing about death is "So it goes."
The Tralfamadorians transport Billy to Tralfamadore and place him inside a transparent geodesic dome exhibit in a zoo; the inside resembles a house on planet Earth. The Tralfamadorians later abduct a pornographic film star named Montana Wildhack, who had disappeared on Earth and supposedly drowned in San Pedro Bay. The Tralfamadorians intend to have her mate with Billy. Montana and Billy fall in love and have a child together. Billy is instantaneously sent back to Earth in a time warp to re-live past or future moments of his life.
In 1968, Billy and a co-pilot are the only survivors of a plane crash in Vermont. While driving to visit Billy in the hospital, Valencia crashes her car and dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Billy shares a hospital room with Bertram Rumfoord, a Harvard University history professor researching an official war history of the USAAF in World War II. They discuss the bombing of Dresden, which the professor initially refuses to believe Billy witnessed. Despite the significant loss of civilian life and the destruction of Dresden, they both regard the bombing as a justifiable act.
Billy's daughter takes him home to Ilium. He escapes and flees to New York City. In Times Square he visits a pornographic book store, where he discovers books written by Kilgore Trout and reads them. He discovers a science fiction novel titled The Big Board at the bookstore. The novel is about a couple abducted by extraterrestrials. The aliens trick the abductees into thinking they are managing investments on Earth, which excites the humans and, in turn, sparks interest in the observers. He also finds some magazine covers that mention Montana Wildhack's disappearance.
While Billy surveys the bookstore, one of Montana's pornographic films plays in the background. Later in the evening, when he discusses his time travels to Tralfamadore on a radio talk show, he is ejected from the studio. He returns to his hotel room, falls asleep, and time-travels back to 1945 in Dresden. Billy and his fellow prisoners are tasked with locating and burying the dead. After a Maori New Zealand soldier working with Billy dies of dry heaves the Germans begin cremating the bodies en masse with flamethrowers. German soldiers execute Billy's friend Edgar Derby for stealing a teapot. Eventually all of the German soldiers leave to fight on the Eastern Front, leaving Billy and the other prisoners alone with tweeting birds as the war ends.
Through non-chronological storytelling, other parts of Billy's life are told throughout the book. After Billy is evicted from the radio studio, Barbara treats Billy as a child and often monitors him. Robert becomes starkly anti-communist, enlists as a Green Beret and fights in the Vietnam War. Billy is eventually killed in 1976, at which point the United States has been partitioned into twenty countries and attacked by China with thermonuclear weapons. He gives a speech in a baseball stadium in Chicago in which he predicts his own death and proclaims that "if you think death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I've said." Billy soon after is shot with a laser gun by an assassin commissioned by the elderly Lazzaro.
Characters
Narrator: Recurring as a minor character, the narrator seems anonymous while also clearly identifying himself as Kurt Vonnegut, when he says, "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." As noted above, as an American soldier during World War II, Vonnegut was captured by Germans at the Battle of the Bulge and transported to Dresden. He and fellow prisoners-of-war survived the bombing while being held in a deep cellar of Schlachthof Fünf ("Slaughterhouse-Five"). The narrator begins the story by describing his connection to the firebombing of Dresden and his reasons for writing Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim: A fatalistic optometrist ensconced in a dull, safe marriage in Ilium, New York. During World War II, he was held as a prisoner of war in Dresden and survived the firebombing, experiences which had a lasting effect on his post-war life. His time travel occurs at desperate times in his life; he relives past and future events and becomes fatalistic (though not a defeatist) because he claims to have seen when, how and why he will die. Roland Weary: A weak man dreaming of grandeur and obsessed with gore and vengeance, who saves Billy several times (despite Billy's protests) in hopes of attaining military glory. He coped with his unpopularity in his home city of Pittsburgh by befriending and then beating people less well-liked than him, and is obsessed with his father's collection of torture equipment. Weary is also a bully who beats Billy and gets them both captured, leading to the loss of his winter uniforms and boots. Weary dies of gangrene on the train en route to the POW camp, and blames Billy in his dying words. Paul Lazzaro: Another POW. A sickly, ill-tempered car thief from Cicero, Illinois, who takes Weary's dying words as a revenge commission to kill Billy. He keeps a mental list of his enemies, claiming he can have anyone "killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses." Lazzaro eventually fulfills his promise to Weary and has Billy assassinated by a laser gun in 1976. Kilgore Trout: A failed science fiction writer whose hometown is also Ilium, New York, and who makes money by managing newspaper delivery boys. He has received only one fan letter (from Eliot Rosewater; see below). After Billy meets him in a back alley in Ilium, he invites Trout to his wedding anniversary celebration. There, Kilgore follows Billy, thinking the latter has seen through a "time window." Kilgore Trout is also a main character in Vonnegut's 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. Edgar Derby: A middle-aged high school teacher who felt that he needed to participate in the war rather than just send off his students to fight. One of his sons is serving with the marines in the Pacific Theatre. Though relatively unimportant, Derby seems to be the only American before the bombing of Dresden to understand what war can do to people. During Campbell's presentation he stands up and castigates him, defending American democracy and the alliance with the Soviet Union. German forces summarily execute him for looting after they catch him taking a teapot from catacombs after the bombing. Vonnegut has said that this death is the climax of the book as a whole.