1The impossibility of writing about a massacre
The narrator opens by admitting he has nothing intelligent to say about Dresden, so the book will be short and 'jumbled and jangled,' like the thoughts of a man who watched a city burn. Harrison Starr's joke that an anti-war book is like an anti-glacier book hangs over everything: wars keep coming no matter what anyone writes. Vonnegut's answer is not a polished argument but a shape, a book that begins and ends with a bird asking 'Poo-tee-weet?' because that is the only sound appropriate to the aftermath. The point: some subjects break language, and honesty about that break is more truthful than eloquence.
Characters:Kurt Vonnegut (the narrator)
2War is fought by children
Mary O'Hare's anger gives the book its spine: 'You were just babies then!' The men who fought were children drafted into an adult catastrophe, and every book that makes them heroes lies about that. Billy Pilgrim is the proof, a chaplain's assistant in a too-small coat and silver boots, photographed with his hands on his head as an example of how wretched American soldiers looked. There are no heroes here, only boys who sink to the bottom of pools and resist rescue. The point: the glory version of war erases the children who actually did the dying.
Characters:Billy PilgrimMary O'Hare
3Time and fatalism
The Tralfamadorians see all moments at once: every moment exists simultaneously, death is only a momentary condition, and the universe ends because a test pilot has always pressed the button and always will. 'The moment is structured that way.' Billy absorbs this philosophy and it frees him from fear, but it also explains his passivity, the same passivity that made Roland Weary hate him. If you cannot change anything, you can only look at each moment as it is. The point: the comfort of seeing all time at once is also the surrender of ever trying to change it.
Characters:Billy PilgrimRoland Weary
4Death as an ordinary event
Every death in the book, from Roland Weary's gangrene to Valencia's carbon monoxide poisoning to Billy's laser gunshot in Chicago, is followed by the same flat phrase: 'So it goes.' The repetition is not callousness; it is a discipline, borrowed from the Tralfamadorian view that the dead are still alive in other moments. Billy foresees his own death many times and does nothing to stop it, because it cannot be stopped. The point: a phrase that shrugs at death is the only way to keep narrating a world full of it.
Characters:Billy PilgrimRoland WearyValencia Merble
5Free will as an illusion
Billy asks the Tralfamadorians why they chose him for the zoo, and they answer with a question: 'Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything?' Humans are bugs trapped in amber, fixed in the moment they occupy, and asking why is a human mistake. The Tralfamadorians let the test pilot destroy the universe because they always have and always will. Billy never struggles against capture, the boxcar, the zoo, or the bullet waiting for him in 1976. The point: the book offers fatalism as both a genuine consolation and a quiet indictment of everyone who stops asking why.
Characters:Billy Pilgrim