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Slaughterhouse 5 follows its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, through the eyes of Kurt Vonnegut himself, as he describes Billy’s fictionalized experience (and at times, Vonnegut’s real one) fighting, and inevitably getting captured by the Nazis during the second World War. GradeSaver, 24 September 2000 Web.If you’re looking for a book to challenge the conventions of storytelling and offer a hefty yet important thematic statement, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is for you.
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Next Section Character List Previous Section About Slaughterhouse Five Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format Borey, Eddie. is split into petty nations and Chicago is hydrogen-bombed "by angry chinamen," Billy is killed by a high-powered laser gun. His daughter Barbara, 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.īilly claims to know how he will die. 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 wife dies almost immediately afterward. He says nothing about the events until he suffers head injuries in a plane crash. 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. They take him to their world and put him in a zoo, where he mates with an actress called Montana Wildhack. For them, all moments happen simultaneously and always. The Tralfamadorians exist in the fourth dimension, and consquently they have a completely different view of time. On the night of his daughter's wedding, Billy (as he claims) is kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. Her father is wealthy, and with a little help from him, Billy grows rich. After he is release, he marries Valencia as planned. There, he is introduced to the science fiction of Kilgore Trout by a fellow patient. After getting engaged to the daughter of the school's owner, Billy has a mental breakdown and is committed to a veteran's hospital. He goes back to Ilium to finish optometry school. In May, Russians take the area and Billy is repatriated. When that work is over, Billy and the other men return to the stable to wait out the rest of the war. The American prisoners stay in an innkeepers stable for a while, but soon the authorities round up POWs to excavate the city for bodies. With no food or water, the POWs and four guards trek out to the suburbs. The next day at noon, the come out and find a landscape that looks like the surface of the moon. Billy and the other POWs wait out the bombing in a meat cellar. But in the span of one night in February of 1945, Dresden is bombed until almost nothing is left. The Americans then are moved to Dresden, a beautiful German city that has no major industries and no significant military presence. He is captured behind German lines before his capture is the first time he gets unstuck in time.īilly and the other American POWs are temporarily shipped to a camp full of dying Russians and a few pampered British officers. After minimal training, he sent to Europe right in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. He grows into a weak and awkward young man, studying briefly at the Ilium School of Optometry briefly before he is drafted. 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.īilly is born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. In between, Billy Pilgrim's life is given to us out of order and in small fragments. 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.
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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.