Slaughterhouse-five Introduction2 Slaughterhouse-five (1969) revolves around the firebombing of the city of Dresden by the American and the British air forces in February 1945, and by extension, focuses on the role the US played (in the re-division of the world) during and after WWII. Vonnegut was an American prisoner of war who. Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel filled with insights about a person’s time during their life and how it should be spent. Kurt Vonnegut gives the reader many different examples of how time is a precious thing that cannot be changed through his own manipulation of the idea of time with Billy Pilgrim and his time-travel experiences and memories. Slaughterhouse-Five is part autobiographical, part science-fiction, part sarcastic master work by Kurt Vonnegut. It is often assigned by college and high school reading and writing classes, especially when our President wants us to go out and kill somebody. Slaughterhouse-Five came out in 1969 near the height of the War in Vietnam.
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Chapter Five:
Summary:
En route to Tralfamadore, Billy asks for something to read. The only human novel is Valley of the Dolls, and when Billy asks for a Tralfamadorian novel, he learns that the aliens' novels are slim, sleek volumes. Because they have a different concept of time, Tralfamadorians have novels arranged by juxtaposition of marvelous moments. The books have no cause or effect or chronology; their beauty is in the arrangement of events meant to be read simultaneously. Billy jumps in time to a visit to the Grand Canyon taken when he was twelve years old. He is terrified of the canyon. His mother touches him and he wets his pants. He jumps forward in time just ten days, to later in the same vacation. He is visiting Carlsbad Caverns. The ranger turns the lights off, so that the tourists can experience total darkness. But Billy sees a light nearby: the radium dial of his father's watch.
Billy jumps back to the war. The Germans think Billy is one of the funniest creatures they've seen in all of the war. His coat is preposterously small, and on his already awkward body it looks ridiculous. The Americans give their names and serial numbers so that they can be reported to the Red Cross, and then they are marched to sheds occupied by middle-aged British POWs. The British welcome them with singing. These British POWs are officers, some of the first Brits taken prisoner in the war. They have been prisoners for four years. Due to a clerical error early in the war, the Red Cross shipped them an incredible surplus of food, which they have hoarded cleverly. Consequently, they are some of the best-fed people in Europe. Their German captors adore them. To prepare for their American guests, the Brits have cleaned and set out party favors. Candles and soap, supplied by the Germans, are plentiful: the British do not know that these items are made from the bodies of Holocaust victims. They have prepared a huge dinner and a dramatic adaptation of Cinderella. Billy is so unhinged that his laughter at the performance becomes hysterical shrieking, and he is taken to the hospital and doped up on morphine. Edgar Derby watches over him, reading The Red Badge of Courage. He leaps in time to the mental ward where he recovered in 1948.
In the mental ward, Billy's bed is next to the bed of Elliot Rosewater. Like Billy, he has little love for life, in part because of things he saw and did in the war. He is the man who introduces Billy to the science fiction of Kilgore Trout. Billy is enduring one of his mother's dreaded visits. She is a simple, religious woman. She makes Billy feel worse just by being there. Billy leaps back in time to the POW camp. A British colonel talks to Derby; after the newly arrived Americans shaved, the British were shocked by how young they all were. Derby tells of how he was captured: the Americans were pushed back into a forest, and the Germans rained shells on them until they surrendered.
Billy leaps back to the hospital. He is being visited by his ugly, overweight fiancée Valencia. He knew he was going crazy when he proposed to her. He does not want to marry her. She is visiting now, eating a Three Musketeers bar and wearing a diamond engagement ring that Billy found while in Germany. Elliot tells her about The Gospel from Outer Space, a Kilgore Trout book. Valencia tries to talk to Billy about plans for their wedding and marriage, but he is not too involved. He leaps forward in time to the zoo on Tralfamadore, where he was on display when he was forty-four years old. The habitat is furnished with Sears and Roebuck furniture. He is naked. He answers questions posed by the Tralfamadorian tourists. He learns that there are five sexes among the Tralfamadorians, but the sex difference is only visible in the fourth dimension. On earth there are actually seven sexes, all necessary to the production of children; earthlings just do not notice the sex difference between themselves because many of the sex acts occur in the fourth dimension. These ideas baffle Billy, and they in turn are baffled by his linear concept of time. Billy expects the Tralfamadorians to be concerned about or horrified by the wars on earth. He worries that earthlings will eventually threaten all the other races in the galaxy, causing the eventual destruction of the universe. The Tralfamadorians put their hands over their eyes, which lets Billy know that he is being stupid. The Tralfamadorians already know how the universe will end: during experiments with a new fuel, one of their test pilots pushes a button and the entire universe will disappear. They cannot prevent it. It has always happened that way. Billy correctly concludes that trying to prevent wars on Earth is futile. The Tralfamadorians also have wars, but they choose to ignore them. They spend their time looking at the pleasant moments rather than the unpleasant ones; they suggest that humans learn to do the same.
Billy leaps back in time to his wedding night. It is six months after his release from the mental ward. The narrator reminds us that Valencia and her father are very rich, and Billy will benefit greatly from his marriage to her. After they have sex, Valencia tries to ask Billy questions about the war. She wants a heroic war story, but Billy does not really respond to her. He has a crazy thought about the war, which Vonnegut says would make a good epitaph for Billy, and for the author, too: 'Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.' He jumps in time to that night in the prison camp. Edgar Derby has fallen asleep. Billy, doped up still from the morphine, wanders out of the hospital shed. He snags himself on a barbed wire fence, and cannot extract himself until a Russian helps him. Billy never really says a word to the Russian. He wanders to the latrine, where the Americans are sick from the feasting. A long period without food followed by a feast almost always results in violent sickness. Among the sick Americans is a soldier complaining that he has shit his brains out. It is Vonnegut. Billy leaves, passing by three Englishmen who watch the Americans' sickness with disgust. Billy jumps in time again, back to his wedding night. He and his wife are cozy in bed. He jumps in time again, to 1944. It is before he left for Europe; he is riding the train from South Carolina, where he was receiving his training, all the way back to Ilium for his father's funeral.
We return to Billy's morphine night in the POW camp. Paul Lazarro is carried into the hospital; while attempting to steal cigarettes from a sleeping British officer, he was beaten up. The officer is the one carrying him. Seeing now how puny Lazarro is, the officer feels guilty for hitting him so hard. But he is disgusted by the American POWs. A German soldier who adores the British officers comes in and apologizes for the inconvenience of hosting the Americans. He assures the Brits in the room that the Americans will soon be shipped off for forced labor in Dresden. The German officer reads propaganda materials written by Howard Campbell, Jr., a captured American who is now a Nazi. Campbell condemns the self-loathing of the American poor, the inequalities of America's economic system, and the miserable behavior of American POWs. Billy falls asleep and wakes up in 1968, where his daughter Barbara is scolding him. Barbara notices the house is icy cold and goes to call the oil-burner man.
Billy leaps in time to the Tralfamadorian zoo, where Montana Wildhack, a motion picture star, has been brought in to mate with him. Initially unconscious, she wakes to find naked Billy and thousands of Tralfamadorians outside their habitat. They're clapping. She screams. Eventually, though, she comes to love and trust Billy. After a week they're sleeping together. He travels in time back to his bed in 1968. The oil-burner man has fixed the problem with the heater. Billy has just had a wet dream about Montana Wildhack. The next day, he returns to work. His assistants are surprised to see him, because they thought that he would never practice again. He has the first patient sent in, a boy whose father died in Vietnam. Billy tries to comfort the boy by telling him about the Tralfamadorian concept of time. The boy's mother informs the receptionist that Billy is going crazy. Barbara comes to take him home, sick with worry about what how to deal with him.
Analysis:
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Chapter Five is the novel's longest chapter. One of the important recurring themes is human dignity and the ease with which that dignity can be taken away. The novel deals with a war that saw an appalling devaluation of human life, and incredible affronts to human dignity. The Holocaust is alluded to several times in this chapter, as Allied POWs unwittingly use soap and candles made from human bodies. Edgar Derby's fate is known from when we first meet him; he will be executed by a firing squad for trying to steal a teapot. Prodded by Valencia, Billy reveals in this chapter that Derby was doped up when he was shot, barely aware of what was happening. And then of course there is Billy himself, laughed at by his German captors, insulted with the 'gift' of a preposterously small coat, mentally unhinged, berated by his daughter, annoyed by his mother, married to a woman he does not respect, and made to parade himself naked in an alien zoo. Chapter Five shows us a parade of incidents, great and small, in which human dignity is ripped away. Put on display on Tralfamadore, Billy tells his captors honestly that he is as happy in the zoo as he was on earth. On his home world, the treatment he received was no better than the treatment he has received as a zoo specimen; in many ways, the aliens treat him better.
But Vonnegut also questions the concept of 'dignity.' Certain interpretations of dignity can become part of the narrative of war. Americans are insulted for having no dignity by their allies, the British. The British show disgust for the Americans' illness, even though the feast provided by the Brits is the direct cause of the illness. Vonnegut is not holding the British up as true examples of the meaning of dignity. There is something decidedly precious about the officers. For four years, they have been prisoners, but they also have seen far less action and hardship than their American guests. Significantly, they are adored by their Nazi captors because they make war 'look stylish and reasonable, and fun' (94). These men are the type that can come up with war stories when the shooting has stopped, but their stories will be about staying plucky while imprisoned, hoarding food, hosting disgusting Americans. Those same Americans are coming in from one of the most brutal battles fought in Western Europe in all of the Second World War. Real war strips dignity away; Vonnegut refuses to tell a story of soldiers maintaining 'dignity' under the pressure of real fighting. To do so would risk romanticizing war.
Vonnegut never comforts us in this novel with a sense of cause and effect. He never tries to explain why war happens or why men act as they do in wartime; explanations are too often molded into harmful narratives, like the propaganda writing of Howard Campbell, Jr. The Tralfamadorian time travel premise helps Vonnegut to escape having to explain things. The description of the Tralfamadorian novel, with its non-linear story and skillful arranging of events, corresponds to what Vonnegut himself has written. Tralfamadorian philosophy does not provide real comfort to the reader either; although there is some wisdom in accepting things, the Tralfamadorian insistence on ignoring everything unpleasant is not a viable solution in real life. The comfort of the novel comes from Vonnegut's sense of humor and sympathy for human beings, even unlikable ones. And as brutal as events of the novel can be, Vonnegut makes the whimsical and the wistful an important part of the pleasure of the book. Billy's wild thought about the war is more a wish than a statement of fact: 'Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.' The wish provides some comfort, although it stands in direct opposition to what the reader knows was the hard reality. Billy's thought is like a simple, unimposing fantasy, poignant because it is so modest and childlike.
It might be worthwhile to briefly look at some of Vonnegut's repetitions. They abound throughout the book, but because Chapter Five is so long it is easy to find a long list of repetitions here. Feet are often 'ivory and blue': corpses' feet in 1944, as well as Billy's feet in the unheated house in 1967. For some reason, forty-four comes up again and again. Billy is forty-four when he is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians. Billy is captured in 1944. Edgar Derby is forty-four when he dies. Valencia is eating a Three Musketeers bar when she visits Billy in the hospital, alluding back to the Three Musketeers narrative imagined by Roland Weary. Billy's father has a watch with a radium dial; the dial glows in the darkness of Carlsbad Caverns. The Russians have faces like radium dials that glow from the darkness of night at the POW camp. Vonnegut describes himself as having 'breath like mustard gas and roses,' and near the end of the novel the smell of corpses in Dresden is like mustard gas and roses. A careful reader can find many, many more. These repetitions create the sense that although the novel is chronologically disjointed, there is a strong connection between events. The connections are not necessarily cause-and-effect, but they do hint at a larger pattern. Everywhere Billy goes, he sees repetitions and patterns that may or may not mean something. The repetitions may also be another allusion to Homer; remember that Billy's hometown is Ilium, another name for Troy, and the Iliad is the West's greatest war story. Repetition of set phrases is one of the most striking elements of Homer's style.
Chapter Six:
Summary:
Billy wakes after his morphine night in POW camp irresistibly drawn to two tiny treasures. They draw him like magnets; they are hidden in the lining of his coat. It will be revealed later on exactly what they are. He goes back to sleep, and wakes up to the sounds of the British building a new latrine. They have abandoned their old latrine and their meeting hall to the Americans. The man who beat up Lazarro stops by to make sure he is all right, and Lazarro promises that he is going to have the man killed after the war. After the amused Brit leaves, Lazarro tells Derby and Billy that revenge is life's sweetest pleasure. He once brutally tortured a dog that bit him. He is going to have all of his enemies killed after the war. He tells Billy that Weary was his buddy, and he is going to avenge him by having Billy shot after the war. Because of his time hopping, Billy knows that this is true. He will be shot in 1976. At that time, the United States has split into twenty tiny nations. Billy will be lecturing in Chicago on the Tralfamadorian concept of time and the fourth dimension. He tells the spectators that he is about to die, and urges them to accept it. After the lecture, he is shot in the head by a high-powered laser gun.
Back in the POW camp, Billy, Derby, and Lazarro go the theater to elect a leader. On the way over, they see a Brit drawing a line in the dirt to separate the American and British sections of the compound. In the theater, Americans are sleeping anywhere that they can. A Brit lectures them on hygiene, and Edgar Derby is elected leader. Only two or three men actually have the energy to vote. Billy dresses himself in a piece of azure curtain and Cinderella's boots. The Americans ride the train to Dresden. Dresden is a beautiful city, appearing on the horizon like something out of a fairy tale. They are met by eight German irregulars, boys and old men who will be in charge of them for the rest of the war. They march through town towards their new home. The people of Dresden watch them, and most of them are amused by Billy's outlandish costume. One surgeon is not. He scolds Billy about dignity and representing his country and war not being a joke, but Billy is honestly perplexed by the man's anger. He shows the man his two treasures from the lining of his coat: a two-carat diamond and some false teeth. The Americans are brought to their new home, a converted building originally for the slaughter of pigs. The building has a large 5 on it. The POWs are taught the German name for their new home, in case they get lost in the city. In English, it is called Slaughterhouse Five.
Analysis:
Billy's death in the future is described in comic terms. From the high-powered laser beam to the Chicago 'hydrogen-bombed by angry Chinamen,' the future looks like a parody of science fiction. The comic and fantastic elements of Billy's death and his Tralfamadorian experiences suggest that these sections should be understood in playful terms. The comic elements of the story can still instruct, but we should not necessarily take Tralfamadorian wisdom at face value. Vonnegut relieves the pressure of the novel's atrocities by pairing the tragic with the absurd. His sense of humor and imagination are defense against the world. In a similar way, Billy's escape into a science fiction world is a relief from the indignities of his real life.
Billy does not mean to be disrespectful when he dresses himself in the curtain and boots from the Cinderella play. He is cold and needs better shoes. He is also in a real state, mentally. The surgeon who scolds him has a certain conception of war, one that has its merits: war is about the loss of human life, and must be dealt with respectfully. Billy should represent his country. War is not funny. But Vonnegut's depiction of war seems at odds with the surgeon's comments, and points out some of the problems with the surgeon's point of view. In the Poetics of Aristotle, Aristotle defines comedy as art in which people are worse than they are in real life. Worse in this case means sillier, more stupid, base. In these terms, war is a sick comedy on a grand scale. As Vonnegut depicts it, war is darkly humorous. Billy is a buffoon, but his ridiculous costume is no worse than the millions of other undignified things that happen in wartime. It is no more ridiculous than the British offering Americans a huge feast after they have been deprived of food for days, resulting, of course, in everyone getting the shits. It is no more ridiculous than pathetic Paul Lazarro threatening men with death, or poor Edward Derby surviving the Battle of the Bulge only to be shot for trying to steal a tea pot. And we already know that Vonnegut is skeptical of the idea of representing one's country. The British behave in ways that the surgeon might respect, but there is something bombastic and hollow about their high spirits. They have hoarded food while the Russians around them starve. They call the Americans weak and dirty when these same American troops have just come in from some of the worst fighting of the war in Western Europe. In all of this, Vonnegut points out how easily human dignity can be taken away; he also questions the idea of dignity itself, and its place in conventional war narratives. Dignity has many forms, and some of these forms are of questionable value.
Irony saturates the circumstances surrounding the American POW camp in Dresden. They are told before they go that Dresden has no significant industries or military force, and so it will not be bombed. They expect to be safe. They also are staying at a slaughterhouse, but ironically, the POWs and their guards are some of the only people who are going to survive the bombing.
Teaching and learning resources for the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five are the only two of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels for which he gave himself an A+. They have all the characteristics of his best writing: satirical humor, absurdity, fascinating science-fiction concepts, and dark commentary on social issues, human nature, and the human condition.
Office 2016 for mac multi user. Slaughterhouse-Five is based partly on Vonnegut’s own experiences and observations as a soldier in World War II. Captured by the German army, he was in a meat locker underground when the city of Dresden was bombed by Allied planes, killing 25,000 or more people in a matter of hours. The book that resulted from these experiences is a powerful statement against war, but also one that recognizes the futility of such statements. The story also involves an alien species, the Tralfamadorians, whose perspective on human beings is a vehicle for commentary on human nature. The Tralfamadorians experience time in a nonlinear way, and the story itself is narrated nonlinearly. Thus the story is a puzzle of war scenes, alien abduction, and suburban American life after the war, told in a satirical voice. In other words, a classic.
In addition to my own study questions and brief notes on the novel, I’ve linked a useful Teacher’s Guide from the book’s publishers (Penguin/Random House), an interesting interview with Vonnegut, an obituary that gives perspective on his life and work, and resources related to World War II and the bombing of Dresden.
The 1972 film version of the novel linked here is generally well regarded by critics, but more importantly, Vonnegut himself apparently gave it his stamp of approval.
Related Resources
Slaughterhouse-Five Study Questions (PDF)
Notes on Slaughterhouse-Five (PDF)
World War II Resources:
Bombing of Dresden in WWII (Wikipedia)
Remembering Dresden: 70 Years After the Firebombing (The Atlantic)
Why Did We Burn Dresden’s People?
The War: A Ken Burns Film (Blu-ray)
Bombing of Dresden in WWII (Wikipedia)
Remembering Dresden: 70 Years After the Firebombing (The Atlantic)
Why Did We Burn Dresden’s People?
The War: A Ken Burns Film (Blu-ray)
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Chapter 1
1. What do we learn in the early part of the novel about the events at Dresden? Why is the narrator so driven to write about Dresden? How does the narrator feel about the significance of the novel?
2. What is the significance of the narrator’s repeated comment “So it goes,” and what attitude do you think it is meant to express?
3. What does the narrator seem to think of “tough” people like his boss in Alplaus, who was a “lieutenant colonel in public relations in Baltimore”? Who are they contrasted with?
4. Why do you think information about the bombing of Dresden was still top secret at the time Vonnegut was working on the novel, years after the war had ended?
5. Why is Mary O’Hare angry with the narrator, and how does he respond to her anger? Consider the poem by Wilfred Owen in this handout. Why is “The Children’s Crusade” an appropriate title for any work about war?
6. What characteristics of the city itself make the firebombing of Dresden especially savage, tragic, and ironic?
7. What is Vonnegut’s attitude toward massacres like the firebombing of Dresden—what lessons does he try to convey to his sons? How does he seem to feel about the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah?
Chapter 2
1. What is the most fundamental difference between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2?
2. What unique phenomenon happens to Billy Pilgrim? Describe the effect it has on him. (Consider, for example, his experience giving a speech to the Lions Club after being elected president.) Based on the information in this chapter, what do you think is the source or nature of this phenomenon?
3. Describe the Tralfamadorians as depicted by Billy. What characteristic philosophical beliefs and attitudes do they have? How is “so it goes” a reflection of their philosophy? Why does Billy feel compelled to tell people about them?
4. Based on the descriptions of him and the actions he takes (or doesn’t take) in this chapter, describe Billy Pilgrim as he is during the war. What is the tone of the narration in depicting him?
5. Describe Roland Weary. What insights into his character does the chapter provide?
6. In the context of an anti-war novel, what do Billy and Roland represent—what are they examples of? Consider the important characteristic they have in common despite all their differences.
7. Find examples of irony in this chapter.
Chapters 3 & 4
1. Describe the experiences of the prisoners during and after their capture. What is the overall effect of the narrator’s presentation of these events? What themes are suggested by the narrator’s descriptions of the photographer and the men with the “motion-picture camera”?
2. Why do you think Billy experiences the war movie backwards—what is the significance of this way of perceiving it? What significance do you think the references to Adam and Eve in these chapters (Billy’s seeing a vision of them in the German officer’s boots and thinking of them while watching the war movie) have?
3. Describe Billy’s life as a middle-aged man after the war. In his leaps into his future life, what trends and themes do we see? Is there any foreshadowing of these trends during the war?
4. What theme that permeates the novel is suggested by these details from these chapters?
- “Billy was not moved to protest the bombing of North Vietnam, did not shudder about the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do.”
- “Among the things Billy could not change were the past, the present, and the future.”
- “Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
- “If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings, I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’”
Chapters 5 & 6
1. What examples of the unique Tralfamadorian perception of the universe are presented at the beginning of Chapter 5? Discuss them. Explain why Tralfamadorian novels are so different from Earth novels. How does this information relate to the structure Slaughterhouse-Five—does it have any implications for how the novel should be read?
2. Describe the English officers that Billy and the Americans are left with.
They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun.
In what ways is their situation absurd? How do they deal with their situation? (What qualities do they show that might be seen as characteristically English?) How do they react to the Americans, and why? Do you think their judgments of the Americans are fair? Why or why not?
3. Interpret Billy’s dream about being a giraffe. Why does he commit himself to a mental hospital? (Consider his belief that his decision to marry Valencia is “one of the symptoms of his disease.”) Is there any connection between the dream and his decision to have himself committed?
4. Why do Billy and Eliot Rosewater enjoy reading science fiction? Why do you think people in the modern world need “a lot of wonderful new lies” and that the wisdom in The Brothers Karamazov “isn’t enough anymore”? How might the Tralfamadorians’ philosophy of life provide an answer to the problem of how to go on living in the modern world? (Consider, for example, the lesson for Earthlings passed on to Billy while he is in the Tralfamadorian zoo and Billy’s attitude toward his own death.)
5. What flaw does the author Kilgore Trout see in the teachings of the New Testament?
6. What do you think is the meaning of the epitaph on the drawing of the gravestone (“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt”)?
7. How are Americans perceived by Germans (through the propaganda written by Howard W. Campbell)? Is there any truth to his descriptions of Americans and American culture?
8. What do you think is the significance of the brief appearances of the narrator (presumably Vonnegut himself) in these chapters (as an American soldier overheard by Billy)?
9. What transformation do we see in Billy in the scene in which he is assassinated (also hinted at in earlier flash-forward scenes of his later life)? How would you explain this change in him?
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10. How is Dresden described in Chapter 6, and what is the significance of this description?
Chapters 7 & 8
1. In describing the significance and unusualness of Edgar Derby’s speech denouncing Howard Campbell, the narrator says, “One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” What do you think he means?
2. Based on the narrator’s description of its plot, what seems to be the main idea expressed by Kilgore Trout’s novel The Gutless Wonder?
3. Why does Billy have such a strong reaction to the Febs (“four ordinary men, cow-eyed and mindless and anguished as they went from sweetness to sourness to sweetness again”) when they sing at his anniversary party? What is the “great big secret somewhere inside” Billy that he had not suspected he had? How is Kilgore Trout’s comment that he looked “as though [he] all of a sudden realized [he was] standing on thin air” an appropriate description?
4. What ironies are there in the survival of the American prisoners through the destruction of Dresden?
5. Why do you think the Slaughterhouse-Five guards look like a barbershop quartet? What is the tone of this way of describing them?
6. Describe the scenes the narrator witnesses after the firebombing of Dresden. What do the Allies intend to accomplish by destroying the city? After the narrator’s description of the devastation and of the attempts by American pilots to kill the few survivors, he succinctly comments, “The idea was to hasten the end of the war.” Discuss your understanding of the intended tone and effect of this sentence.
7. Why do you think the one hundred American prisoners don’t try to escape from the four guards after the destruction of Dresden?
8. Describe the reaction of the family that owns the inn to the firebombing of Dresden. Discuss the tone and significance of the chapter-ending words spoken by the owner: “Good night, Americans. Sleep well.”
Chapters 9 & 10
1. What is the significance of Valencia’s death (in terms of them, plot, etc.)? What is ironic about the transformation in Robert Pilgrim’s character after he joins the Green Berets?
2. Discuss the significance of the narrator’s presentation of the character of Professor Rumfoord. Describe Billy’s attitude toward the bombing of Dresden as revealed in his conversation with Rumfoord. How would you interpret Vonnegut’s presentation of the quotations from the foreword to The Destruction of Dresden?
3. Why doesn’t Billy cry much during the war, and why do you think he does cry about the horses pulling the wagon in Dresden? (Think about the epigraph of the novel: “But the little Lord Jesus/No crying he makes.”) What is the significance of the fact that the German doctors notice the horses’ condition, but “the Americans had treated their form of transportation as though it were no more sensitive than a six-cylinder Chevrolet”?
4. Jesus is mentioned several other times in these chapters. What do you think is the significance of these details?
- He and his father are happy to build a cross for Roman soldiers to use in an execution.
- The protagonist of Kilgore Trout’s novel sees him “dead as a doornail.”
- The Tralfamadorians find Darwin much more interesting than Jesus.
5. Discuss the significance of Billy’s coming across the Kilgore Trout novels and the magazine about Montana Wildhack’s disappearance in the bookstore.
6. Why are Billy and Montana Wildhack so casual about the potentially upsetting things they say about each other (e.g. that he saw part of a “blue movie” she made and that he was a “clown” in the war)? Discuss the significance of the quote on Montana’s locket: “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.”
7. What do you think is the purpose of the first section of Chapter 10? What is the meaning of the narrator’s later comment regarding the Earth’s future population of 7 billion that “they will all want dignity”?
8. The plot of the novel seems to lack a conventional climax and resolution. Evaluate the last two chapters as an ending to the story. Why do you think Vonnegut chose to end the story the way he did? Discuss the significance of the last line of the novel.
Summary and Review Questions
1. What attitudes does Vonnegut (as the narrator) seem to have toward the questions of human existence, human nature, and human society? Consider some of the following details from the text:
- “Like so many Americans, [Billy’s mother] was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
- What do you think the narrator means when he says he learned that “nobody [is] ridiculous or bad or disgusting” (Chapter 1), and how does that idea apply to this story?
- How would you interpet the symbolic and thematic significance of the birds whistling “Poo-tee-weet?” (This idea is mentioned near the end of Chapter 1 and then again at the end of the novel.)
2. Why do you think Vonnegut chose to incorporate science fiction elements into what is largely a true account of a historical event?
3. Why do you think Vonnegut chose to structure the story in such an unconventional way rather than in a chronological way or through a more traditional flashback structure?
4. What logical paradoxes does being “unstuck in time” present?
5. Find and discuss three instances of irony in the novel. What thematic significance do they have?
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6. Find three examples of absurdity in the novel and discuss their significance.
Writing Prompts
1. Discuss the various ways Vonnegut develops the anti-war message in the novel. Do you think this message is expressed effectively? Explain why or why not.
2. Do you think Billy’s Tralfamadorian perspective on time and his experiences with time travel are real or delusions? Consider the evidence in the text, including these words about the French soldier/doctor/writer Celine in Chapter 1:
Time obsessed him. Miss Ostrovsky reminded me of the amazing scene in Death on the Installment Plan where Celine wants to stop the bustling of a street crowd. He screams on paper, Make them stop…don’t let them move anymore at all…There, make them freeze…once and for all! …So that they won’t disappear anymore!
Questions © 2014 C. Brantley Collins, Jr.
The repetition of the expression “So it goes” after every mention of a person’s death suggests two of the novel’s central ideas:
1. Death is inevitable and universal, a basic fact of existence for living things.
2. Given this fact, the appropriate attitude toward death is casual acceptance. “So it goes” is much like “C’est la vie,” a commonly used French expression that literally translates to “that’s life” or “such is life,” suggesting that life is full of disappointments that can’t be avoided—except in this case the “disappointment” is the end of one’s existence, so the expression is humorously understated in tone.
From the Tralfamadorian point of view, a person’s life and death exist simultaneously since time is an illusion, so it is foolish to think of death as an “end” or as something to get upset about. In fact, their philosophy implies that one should never get upset over anything, since it is all unavoidable anyway. In a sense, everything that will ever happen has already happened, so how could it be changed?
It is this fact that makes Billy’s “time travel” (being “unstuck in time”) possible: he is able to experience events “out of order” because the order itself is just an illusion, and his mind has moved beyond that illusion. But even though this perspective gives him knowledge of future events, he can’t change them, because they have already happened. (This realization fits with Billy’s extremely passive personality: he understands that he cannot change anything, so in a sense he just relaxes and lets it unfold—this is a characteristically Tralfamadorian attitude.)
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.[…]It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
The philosophical concept that all events (including human choices) are “set in stone” and cannot be changed because they proceed according to absolute laws of cause and effect is known as determinism. It is similar to fatalism, the belief that fate or destiny determines the course of events.
Wars, and terrible crimes like the bombing of Dresden, are just as inevitable as the deaths of individuals. So the novel is a paradox: it is meant, in part, as a warning and a reminder to help people avoid war, but it acknowledges that war cannot be avoided. Trying to prevent wars from occurring is as pointless as trying to keep a glacier from moving:
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
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“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”
The novel suggests that Billy’s ideas about time travel and Tralfamadorians may merely be the result of the head injury he sustains in the airplane crash, but the clues are ambiguous: some details of the novel suggest these ideas are just delusions, while others suggest they are factual.
Another central idea in the novel is absurdity (which in this sense can also be expressed as irony): the observation that human life and human society are full of absurd situations and decisions, and sometimes these absurdities are horrifying and tragic. The incident that serves as the foundation for this theme is mentioned early on: in the aftermath of the deaths of many thousands of people in the bombing of Dresden, Edgar Derby is summarily executed for the simple act of taking a teapot from the ruins of a building.
“I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby,” I said. “The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he’s given a regular trial, and then he’s shot by a firing squad.”
Themes and Motifs
The tragic absurdity of human life and behavior: Many of the things we do, and many of the things that happen to us, are illogical, arbitrary, tragic, and ironic.
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- The execution of Edgar Derby for stealing a teapot (following the murder of hundreds of thousands of people) seems unjust and ironic.
- The Tralfamadorian interest in observing human behavior suggests that our behavior is a fascinating subject of study for those who are not influenced by our biases and preconceptions about behavioral standards.
Fatalism and determinism: All events exist simultaneously; time is just a subjective perception of events. One implication of this view of reality is that we are all governed by fate, since in a sense everything that is going to happen has already happened.
- The futility of our efforts to affect the future is one aspect of the absurdity and helplessness of our lives.
- The Tralfamadorian saying “So it goes” is an expression of the acceptance of absurd, arbitrary fate (the equivalent of “shit happens.”)
The vast cruelty and suffering of war:
- Because the suffering that results from a decision such as the bombing of Dresden is so removed from those who cause it, it is abstract; thus it is much easier to callously inflict such suffering.
- Those who have experienced war firsthand tend to be cynical about it (there are no real “good guys” if even the U.S. can commit acts like the bombing of Dresden) and opposed to it.