Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a 1969 novel by best-selling author Kurt Vonnegut. His most popular work and widely regarded as a classic, it combines science fiction elements with an analysis of the human condition from an uncommon perspective, using time travel as a plot device and the bombing of Dresden in World War II, which Vonnegut witnessed, as a starting point.

Plot

A disoriented and ill-trained American soldier named Billy Pilgrim is captured by German soldiers and is forced to live in a makeshift prison, the deep cellars of a disused slaughterhouse in the city of Dresden, Germany. Billy has become "unstuck in time", for unexplained reasons, and randomly repeatedly visits different parts of his life, including his death. He meets, and is later kidnapped by, aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who exhibit him in a Tralfamadorian zoo with another Earth woman. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth dimension being time. Tralfamadorians have seen every instant of their lives already; they cannot choose to change anything about their fate, but can choose to spend time in any moment in their lives that they wish.

Related Topics:
Billy Pilgrim - Captured - German - Dresden - Aliens - Tralfamadore - Dimension

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Throughout the novel, Billy bops back and forth in time, reliving various occasions in his life; this gives him a constant sense of stage fright, as he never knows what part of his life is coming up next. He spends time on Tralfamadore; in Dresden; numbly wading through deep snow in WWII Germany before his capture; living married in America after the war; up to the moment of his murder on Earth many years later. By the time of his murder, Billy has adopted Tralfamadorian fatalism, which has given him great personal peace; he has spread this philosophy to millions of humans and has become the most popular public figure on Earth.

Related Topics:
Stage fright - Fatalism

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Billy's fatalism appears to be grounded in reality (at least that reality which Billy perceives); after noting that Billy had a copy of the Serenity Prayer in his office, the narrator says, "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." His Tralfamadorian captors say that out of 131 inhabited planets they have visited, "only on Earth is there any talk of free will."

Related Topics:
Serenity Prayer - Free will

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The book examines many other events in Billy's life, including the death of his wife, his capture by the Nazis in World War II, and the infamous bombing of Dresden, the inspiration for the book. The novel uses certain phrases repetitively, such as "so it goes"—which, used whenever death or dying is mentioned (be it a man, an animal, or the bubbles in champagne), serves to downplay mortality, making it routine and even humorous—and "mustard gas and roses", to denote the horrible odor of a rotting corpse or a drunk's breath.

Related Topics:
Dresden - Mustard gas - Rose - Corpse - Drunk

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