Slaughter house - five

This is the great anti-war novel that refuses to make war exciting. Vonnegut watched a beautiful city burn and came back with no heroes, no battles, just a dazed optometrist and a lot of corpses. If you have ever wondered how to talk about atrocity without glamour, or how to keep living after the worst thing happens, this book is for you. It is funny, strange, and devastating, often in the same sentence.

1. 1

   Act 1

   A Duty-Dance with Death

   The narrator, Kurt Vonnegut himself, a former POW who was there, struggles for years to write about the firebombing of Dresden, and every attempt turns into a disaster. He drinks with his old war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare. O'Hare's wife Mary gets angry when she hears what kind of book he means to write: she fears it will make heroes of the men who fought. 'You were just babies then!' she says, and she is right. Vonnegut promises her the book will be called 'The Children's Crusade,' and that promise shapes everything that follows. In 1967, Guggenheim Foundation money sends the narrator and O'Hare back to Dresden, and on the plane he scribbles the whole book on scraps of paper. A friend named Harrison Starr tells him an anti-war book is as pointless as an anti-glacier book, since wars are as unstoppable as glaciers. The narrator agrees, sort of. He says the book will be short and 'jumbled and jangled,' because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everyone in the story is dead except him and O'Hare. So the book begins and ends with a bird asking, 'Poo-tee-weet?', the only sound left worth making.

2. 2

   Act 2

   Unstuck in Time

   Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist from Ilium, New York, born in 1922, has come unstuck in time. He served as a chaplain's assistant in World War II, was captured during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, survived Dresden, married Valencia Merble, had two children, got rich, and in 1967 was abducted by aliens from Tralfamadore. All of this happens to him out of order. His first slip comes while he is lost behind German lines with Roland Weary, an antitank gunner, and two scouts. Weary fantasizes that they are a heroic trio like the Three Musketeers, but the scouts abandon him and Billy, so Weary transfers the fantasy onto Billy, casting himself as savior and Billy as the ungrateful sidekick. He grows to hate Billy for his passivity. Meanwhile Billy blinks through his whole life: a small boy thrown into the deep end of a YMCA pool by his father, sinking to the bottom, feeling peaceful, resisting rescue. A nursing home in 1965, where his mother asks about the war and he tells her he was in Dresden when it was bombed; she knew, she says, but forgot. A flying saucer in 1967, where he stands naked and asks why, and a voice explains it is an 'Earthling custom' to be naked when captured. His wedding night with Valencia in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where he feels no desire and leaves the bed to stare out the window.

3. 3

   Act 3

   Prisoners and the Zoo

   In a snowy forest in Luxembourg in December 1944, German soldiers capture Billy and Roland Weary. A war photographer takes a picture of Billy standing in the snow with his hands on his head, and the shot later turns up in a book as proof of how wretched American soldiers looked. The Germans confiscate Weary's things, including a pornographic photo of a woman and a pony; Weary demands it back and a soldier throws it into the snow. Weary dies of gangrene in a boxcar, blaming Billy, and with his last breath tells Paul Lazzaro, a small, vengeful, frail prisoner, to avenge him by killing Billy someday. Lazzaro swears he will, and years later, he keeps the promise. The boxcars carry the Americans to a POW camp near Dresden, where Billy arrives on his twenty-third birthday wearing a coat too small for him and silver boots, a ridiculous figure. The prisoners are housed in Schlachthof-fünf, Slaughterhouse-Five, a former livestock-killing plant, and put to work in a factory making malt syrup for pregnant women. An English colonel welcomes them and warns them against escape. The English prisoners stage a musical 'Cinderella,' and Billy laughs so hard he has to be sedated with morphine, which sends him to a mental ward in 1948, where Eliot Rosewater introduces him to the science fiction of Kilgore Trout. Then Tralfamadore: a geodesic dome zoo, where Billy is displayed alongside Montana Wildhack, a kidnapped film star, and the aliens explain that all moments exist at once, so death is only a momentary condition. 'So it goes.'

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Moon and the Bird

   The Tralfamadorians tell Billy the universe will end when one of their test pilots presses a button that destroys it. Billy asks why they do not stop him. 'He has always pressed it, and he always will,' the guide says. 'We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.' When Billy asks why they chose him for the zoo, they answer, 'Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?' and then, 'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.' Back in 1945, the Americans are marched into Dresden, an open, beautiful city with no war industries, and shelter in the slaughterhouse's concrete basement, built for meat storage. On February 13, the firebombing comes, and Billy survives in the meat locker. The next day the prisoners emerge into a moonscape of rubble and corpses, and German guards force them to dig bodies from the ruins. Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American Nazi propagandist in a uniform of his own design, had visited the camp earlier, trying to recruit Americans to fight for Germany against the Russians. Years later, Billy's wife Valencia dies of carbon monoxide poisoning after rushing to the hospital when his plane crashes; her last words are 'How's Billy?' In that same hospital, history professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, writing a book about Dresden, dismisses Billy's presence as irrelevant and insists the bombing was necessary, until Billy finally speaks: 'I was there.' In 1976, in Chicago, giving a speech about the Tralfamadorians, Billy is shot by a laser gun, killed by Paul Lazzaro keeping an old promise. He has foretold it many times. The book ends with the bird: 'Poo-tee-weet?'

• BBilly PilgrimA meek optometrist from Ilium, New York, who has come unstuck in time and drifts through war, zoo captivity, and family life without resistance. He wants nothing, which is exactly what makes him unbearable to men like Roland Weary, and he dies on schedule in 1976, having seen it coming.
• KKurt Vonnegut (the narrator)A former Dresden POW who spent decades failing to write about the firebombing until he promised Mary O'Hare he would write about babies, not heroes. He frames the book, admits it is jumbled, and leaves himself and O'Hare as the only survivors.
• RRoland WearyA cruel, fantasy-prone antitank gunner who casts himself as a heroic savior after the scouts abandon him. He dies of gangrene in a boxcar, blaming Billy, and his dying grudge sets Billy's death in motion decades later.
• PPaul LazzaroA small, frail, vengeful prisoner who swears to Weary that Billy will die for his death. He is the book's one man of follow-through, and he keeps his promise in 1976.
• VValencia MerbleBilly's large, sweet wife, whose father's money made Billy rich. She dies of carbon monoxide poisoning rushing to the hospital after his plane crash, asking 'How's Billy?'
• MMontana WildhackA pornographic film star kidnapped and displayed in the Tralfamadorian zoo beside Billy. She becomes his mate in the geodesic dome, the closest thing the book offers to a love story.
• BBertram Copeland RumfoordA history professor writing a book about Dresden, sharing Billy's hospital room. He insists the bombing was necessary and dismisses Billy's presence as irrelevant, until Billy says, 'I was there.'
• HHoward W. Campbell Jr.An American Nazi propagandist in a uniform of his own design who visits the POW camp to recruit Americans to fight for Germany against the Russians. He wrote a monograph on the sexual behavior of American prisoners.
• EEliot RosewaterA wealthy fellow veteran in Billy's 1948 mental ward who hands Billy his first Kilgore Trout novels. He tells Billy that Trout's books help him understand life, and that the same author will become Billy's favorite too.
• MMary O'HareBernard O'Hare's wife, who gets angry when she learns the narrator plans to write about the war, fearing it will glorify it. Her anger, and the phrase 'You were just babies then!', gives the book its subtitle.

Slaughterhouse-Five

The bird's 'Poo-tee-weet?'

Bugs trapped in amber

Billy's too-small coat and silver boots

The circle with a cross

Billy's death in 1976 is not a shock; he has foretold it many times, and the Tralfamadorian view of time means it has always already happened. The question the ending poses is whether that fatalism is wisdom or surrender. One reading: Billy has achieved peace, seeing every moment as permanent, so the laser in Chicago is no worse than a birthday in a POW camp. Another, darker reading: the man who learned to stop asking why is murdered by a grudge from the war, and his acceptance is just the war's final victory over him. The book closes not on Billy but on the bird asking 'Poo-tee-weet?', returning to the narrator's promise that there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. After all the time-hopping, the last word belongs to a creature that never pretended to understand any of it. That is why it lands: the ending refuses both comfort and outrage, leaving only the sound a bird makes over ruins.

1. 1.Is Billy's Tralfamadorian fatalism a healthy response to trauma or a symptom of it? Consider whether 'So it goes' is consolation or surrender, and what Billy's passivity costs the people around him.
2. 2.Mary O'Hare insists the war book must not glorify its subjects as heroes. Does Vonnegut keep that promise, or does the novel's strangeness and humor make Dresden bearable in a way she would object to?
3. 3.The narrator says there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, yet writes a book anyway. What can fiction do about atrocity that history books, like Rumfoord's, cannot?

Anyone who has ever wondered how to talk about something too terrible to talk about, and readers tired of war stories with heroes. Also ideal for fans of dark, deadpan humor who want a short, strange classic that earns its reputation.

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