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1-Page Summary of Slaughterhouse-Five
Billy is born in 1922 and lives in Ilium, New York. He goes to school there, enrolls in night classes at the Ilium School of Optometry, and gets drafted into the army during World War II. He trains as a chaplain’s assistant near South Carolina where an umpire announces who survives or dies during battles before they all sit down for lunch together. His father dies from a hunting accident shortly before Billy ships overseas to join an infantry regiment stationed in Luxembourg. Then he experiences his first incident of time-shifting: he sees the entirety of his life from beginning to end with one sweep.
Billy is taken to a POW camp in Germany, where he and the other prisoners are treated well by some of their captors. Billy has another hallucination and goes back into time to when the war first started, then travels forward again until he reaches Dresden. He works at a factory making nutritional syrup for the soldiers, but one night Allied forces bomb the city, killing thousands of people. The next day Billy finds that they’re surrounded by death and destruction as they try to dig out bodies from under tons of rubble. After several days Russian troops arrive and take over control of the city.
Billy Pilgrim is discharged from the army and returns to Ilium. He finishes optometry school, gets engaged to Valencia Merble, and becomes a successful businessman. Billy has a nervous breakdown, goes to the veterans’ hospital, receives shock treatments, reads science fiction novels by Kilgore Trout, recovers in the mental ward for several months before getting married again. His father-in-law gives him money to start his own business; he helps raise two children with Valencia and become rich. They have everything they want: a Cadillac car and house with modern appliances that make them happy until he remembers something at their eighteenth wedding anniversary party—a barbershop quartet reminds him of Dresden during World War II when he was there as an American prisoner of war (POW).
The day after his daughter’s wedding, the main character is kidnapped by aliens who resemble toilet plungers. They take him to their planet and mate him with a movie actress named Montana Wildhack. Billy and Montana are placed in a zoo where they’re observed by Tralfamadorians; these extraterrestrial curiosities have been brought to Earth from other planets for observation purposes. The author explains that time exists simultaneously in the fourth dimension, so when someone dies, he or she is simply dead at one point of time but alive somewhere else at another time. Therefore, Tralfamadorians prefer looking at life’s nicer moments rather than focusing on death.
When Billy returns from his time trip, he’s quiet for a while. He later goes to an optometry conference in Montreal and gets on the plane that crashes into a mountain. Valencia dies in an accident on her way to see him in the hospital. His daughter puts him under care of a nurse back home, but he wants to share what he learned with everyone else so they can learn it too. He secretly travels to New York City and goes on a radio show where people hear about it eventually because of all the attention it gets from newspapers and other media outlets. Eventually, his story is printed as well as recorded onto tape by himself before his death which occurs sometime after Chicago has been bombed by China during their war over water rights with Canada (which will occur around 1976).
Chapter 1
Kurt Vonnegut introduces his experiences of the firebombing of Dresden in eastern Germany during World War II. He also shares how he tried to complete a book on the subject for many years, finally getting funding from the Guggenheim Foundation and returning to Dresden with a friend from war times. In 1967, they talk to their cab driver about life under communism. This man is Gerhard Müller, as well as Mary O’Hare’s husband; Vonnegut dedicates Slaughterhouse-Five to him and her. Müller sends them both Christmas cards wishing for world peace.
