the ruins, as the climax of the novel, Bernard still seems unenthusiastic.
The best outline the narrator ever made for his Dresden book was on a roll
of toilet paper, using crayon. Colors represented different people, and the
lines crisscrossed when people met, and ended when they died. The outline
ended with the exchange of prisoners who had been liberated by Americans
and Russians.
After the war, the narrator went home, married, and had kids, all of whom
are grown now. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, and in
anthropology he learned that "there was absolutely no difference between
anybody," and that "nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting." He's
worked various jobs, and tried to keep up work on his Dresden novel all
this time.
He actually did go to see Bernard O'Hare just a few weeks after finding him
over the telephone. He brought his young daughters, who were sent upstairs
to play with O'Hare's kids. The men could not think of any particularly
good memories or stories, and the narrator noticed that Mary, Bernard's
wife (to whom Slaughterhouse Five is dedicated), seemed very angry about
something. Finally, she confronted him: the narrator and Bernard were just
babies when they fought. Mary was angry because if the narrator wrote a
book, he would make himself and Bernard tough men, glorifying war and
turning scared babies into heroes. The movie adaptation would then star
"Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving,
dirty old men" (14). Wars would look good, and we would be sure to have
more of them. The narrator promised that it won't be that kind of book, and
that he'd call it The Children's Crusade. He and Mary were friends starting
at that moment. That night, he and Bernard looked through Bernard's library
for information on the real Children's Crusade, a war slightly more sordid
than the other crusades. The scheme was cooked up by two monks who planned
to raise an army of European children and then sell them into slavery in
North Africa. Sleepless later that night, the narrator looked at a history
of Dresden published in 1908. The book described a Prussian siege of the
city in the eighteenth century.
In 1967, the narrator and O'Hare returned to Dresden. On the flight over,
the narrator got stuck in Boston due to delays. In a hotel in Boston, he
felt that someone had played with all the clocks. With every twitch of a
clock, it seemed that years passed. That night, he read a book by Roethke
and another book by Erika Ostrovsky. The Ostrovsky book, Cйline and His
Vision, is a story of a French soldier whose skull gets cracked during
World War I. He hears noises and suffers from insomnia forever afterward,
and at night he writes grotesque, macabre novels. Cйline sees death and the
passage of time as the same process.
The narrator also read about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the
hotel room's Gideon Bible. He calls attention to the moment when Lot's wife
looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. He loves her for that act,
because it was such a human thing to do.
Now, he presents us with his war book. He will strive to look back no more.
This book, he says, is a failure. It was bound to be a failure because it
was written by a pillar of salt. He gives us the first line and the last,
and the central story of the novel is ready to begin.
Chapter Two. Summary:
"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." He wanders from moment to moment
in his life, experiencing chronologically disparate events right after one
another. He sees his birth and death and everything in between, all out of
order, with no pattern to predict what will come next. Or so he believes.
Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. Tall, thin, and embarrassingly
weak, he made an unlikely soldier. He was going to night school in
optometry when he got drafted to fight in World War II. His father died in
a hunting accident before Billy left for Europe. The Germans captured Billy
during the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945 he returned to the States, finished
optometry school, and married the daughter of the school's owner. During
the engagement, he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. After his
release, he finished school, married the girl, got his own practice with
help from his father-in-law, became quite rich, and had two kids. In 1968
he was the sole survivor of a plane crash. While he was in the hospital,
his wife died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He returned home for rest, but
without warning one day he went to New York and claimed on the radio that
he had been kidnapped by aliens called Trafalmadorians. Billy's daughter,
Barbara, retrieved him from New York. A month later, Billy wrote a letter
to Ilium's newspaper describing the aliens. The Trafalmadorians are shaped
like two-foot tall toilet plungers, suction cup down.
We now see Billy working on a second letter describing the Trafalmadorian
conception of time. All time happens simultaneously, so a man who dies is
actually still alive, since all moments exist at all times. Billy works on
his letter, oblivious to the increasingly frantic shouts of his daughter,
who has stopped by to check on him. The burden of caring for Billy has made
Barbara difficult and unforgiving.
We move to the first time Billy gets unstuck in time. Billy receives
minimal training as a chaplain's assistant before being shipped to Europe.
He arrives in September of 1944, right in the middle of the Battle of the
Bulge. He never meets his chaplain or gets a proper helmet or boots.
Although he survives the onslaught, he wanders behind German lines, tagging
along with two scouts and an anti-tank gunner named Roland Weary. Weary
repeatedly saves Billy's life, mostly by not allowing him to lie down in
the snow and die. Although the scouts are experienced, Weary is as new to
the war as Billy is; he just fancies himself as having more of a taste for
it. By firing the anti-tank gun incorrectly, his gun crew put scorch marks
into the ground. Because of those marks, the position of the gun crew was
revealed to a Tiger tank that fired back. Everyone but Weary was killed. He
is stupid, fat, cruel, and violent. Back in Pittsburgh he was friendless,
and constantly getting ditched. His father collects torture devices. He
carries a cruel trench knife, various pieces of equipment that have been
issued to him, and a pornographic photo of a woman with a horse. He plagues
Billy with macho, aggressive conversation. In his own mind, Weary narrates
the war stories he will one day tell. Although he is almost as clumsy and
slow as Billy, he imagines himself and the two scouts as fast friends. In
his head he dubs them and himself the Three Musketeers, and tells himself
the story of how the Three Musketeers saved the life of a dumb, incompetent
college kid.
Straggling behind the others, Billy becomes unstuck in time. He goes back
to the red light of pre-birth and then forward again to a day in his
childhood with his father at the YMCA. His father tries to teach him how to
swim by the sink-or-swim method. Billy sinks, and someone has to rescue
him. He jumps forward to 1965, when he is a middle-aged man visiting his
mother in a nursing home. Then he jumps to 1958, and Billy is attending his
son's Little League banquet. Leap to 1961: Billy is at a party, totally
drunk and cheating on his wife for the first and only time. Then, he is
back in 1944, being shaken awake by Weary. Weary and Billy catch up to the
scouts. Dogs are barking in the distance, and the Germans are searching for
them. Billy is in bad shape: he looks like hell, can barely walk, and is
having vivid (but pleasant) hallucinations. Weary tries to be chummy with
his supposed buddies, the scouts, grouping himself with them as "the Three
Musketeers." The scouts coldly tell him that he and Billy are on their own.
Billy goes to 1957, when he gives a speech as the newly elected president
of the Lion's Club. Although he has a momentary bout of stage fright, his
speech is beautiful. He has taken a public speaking course.
He leaps back to 1944. Ditched again, Weary starts to beat Billy up,
furious that this weak college kid has cost him his membership in "the
Three Musketeers." He cruelly beats Billy, who is in such a state that he
can only laugh. Suddenly, Weary realizes that they are being watched by
five German soldiers and a police dog. They have been captured.
Chapter Three. Summary:
The troops who capture Billy and Weary are irregulars, newly enlisted men
using the equipment of newly dead soldiers. Their commander is a tough
German corporal, whose beautiful boots are a trophy from a battle long ago.
Once, while waxing the boots, he told a soldier that if you stared into
their shine you could see Adam and Eve. Though Billy has never heard the
corporal's claim, looking into the boots now he sees Adam and Eve and loves
them for their innocence, vulnerability, and beauty. A blond fifteen-year-
old boy helps Billy to his feet; he looks as beautiful and innocent as Eve.
In the distance, shots sound out as the two scouts are killed. Waiting in
ambush, they were found and shot in the backs of their heads.
The Germans take Weary's things, including the pornographic picture, which
the two old men grin about, and Weary's boots. The fifteen-year old gets
Weary's boots, and Weary gets the boy's clogs. Weary and Billy are made to
march a long distance to a cottage where American POWs are being detained.
The soldiers there say nothing. Billy falls asleep, his head on the
shoulder of a Jewish chaplain.
Billy leaps in time to 1967, although it takes him a while to figure out
the date. He is giving an eye exam in his office in Ilium. His car, visible
outside his window, has conservative stickers on the bumper; the stickers
were gifts from his father-in-law.
He leaps back to the war. A German is kicking his feet, telling him to wake
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