Slaughterhouse-Five is a 1969 science fiction novel written by the American author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The novel deals with anti-war themes and time travel while centering its narrative around the bombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II. Slaughterhouse-Five is considered one of the most important anti-war and science fiction novels of the 20th century and has been adapted into films, theatre productions, and radio plays.

Plot Summary

The narrative of Slaughterhouse-Five is told in a non-linear way. The protagonist Billy Pilgrim travels back and forth through time and experiences all of the events of his life at once. The story is bookended by an introduction and a conclusion told from the narrator’s point of view. Having belonged to the same American military unit as Billy Pilgrim during World War II, the narrator decides to write about Billy’s experiences.

Billy Pilgrim is a quiet and unassuming quiet optometry student who enlists in the United States Army during World War II. Because he is not a good soldier, Billy is stationed in Europe as a chaplain’s assistant. Upon arriving on the frontlines, Billy is immediately involved in a battle. Along with a strange, arrogant bully named Roland Weary, Billy wanders through the countryside searching for help. They are captured by German soldiers almost instantly. The prisoners are taken to a station where Weary develops gangrene from his wounds. The Germans pack the prisoners into a carriage and leave them for days. Weary convinces a man named Paul Lazzaro that Billy is responsible for his wounds. Lazzaro promises to kill Billy in the name of revenge.

Here, Billy begins to travel through time. His mind flashes forward and backward through the events of his life. In 1945, he and the other Americans are taken to a prison camp and then to the city of Dresden, where they are housed in an abandoned slaughterhouse named Slaughterhouse-Five. The prisoners hide in the slaughterhouse while the Allied forces bomb Dresden. The bombing of the city destroys everything and kills hundreds of thousands of people, but the prisoners escape unscathed. They crawl through the desolate ruins of the city until they are eventually found and returned to America at the end of the war.

Back in America, Billy struggles to deal with his traumatic memories. He spends time in a veterans’ hospital where he shares a room with a man named Eliot Rosewater. Rosewater introduces Billy to a science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout, whose novels help the pair cope with post-traumatic stress disorder. Billy recovers and marries a rich woman named Valencia Merble. Although, he does not love her, they start a family, and Billy joins her father’s successful optometry business. They have a son named Robert and a daughter named Barbara. On the night of Barbara’s wedding, Billy is abducted by an alien race called the Tralfamadorians. They take him to their planet and exhibit him in a zoo. The Tralfamadorians perceive time and space in four dimensions, allowing them to simultaneously observe all moments in time at once. The aliens have a fatalistic worldview; they already know that they will be responsible for the end of the universe. The Tralfamadorians provide Billy with a mate in the zoo: Montana Wildhack, a pornographic actress from Earth. She falls in love with Billy who continues to travel through time. They have a child.

Billy survives a plane crash in 1968, and Valencia dies while driving to visit him. He shares a hospital room with a military historian and recounts his experiences in Dresden. Barbara tries to take care of Billy, who now wants to tell the world about his travels through time. He escapes Barbara’s attention and travels to New York where he appears on a radio show and talks about the Tralfamadorians. He is gently escorted out of the studio. That night, he travels back to the days after Dresden and remembers a firing squad shooting his friend. The birds sing as the war ends.

Later in Billy’s life, his son becomes a decorated soldier in the Vietnam War, and the United States breaks apart into 20 countries. Now famous, Billy gives a speech about his experiences and knows that he will die afterward. As he leaves the stage, he is shot by an elderly Paul Lazzaro. Billy is prepared for death, assuring his audience that his murder is not a terrible thing.