Slaughterhouse-Five

During the long journey to Tralfamadore, Billy asks for a book. He quickly reads the only human novel on the ship and struggles to read the Tralfamadorian books. The arrangement of the language on the pages intrigues him. The words are arranged as clusters of symbols, separated by stars. The aliens explain that these clusters function like short, urgent telegrams that are read all at once. The messages do not have a beginning, middle, or end, and there is no cause and effect.

The flying saucer passes through a time warp to reach the alien home world quicker. Billy jumps back in time to his 12-year-old self. He briefly visits the Grand Canyon with his parents and then moves forward ten days. The family visit the Carlsbad Caverns, and Billy prays to be rescued before the ceiling collapses. Billy jumps again. He finds himself in Germany in 1945, when he and his fellow prisoners are marched into a shed. A corporal with one arm and one leg diligently writes their names in a big book. The notation of the names means that the men are legally alive. One of the guards can understand a little English. When an American mutters something offensive, the guard shouts at him. Each prisoner is given a tag with their name and number. When a prisoner dies, the tag will be snapped in two to mark his grave.

The American prisoners meet a group of English soldiers who have been in the prison for four years. That evening, the English officers put on a theatre performance. Billy finds himself laughing hysterically at a musical production of Cinderella. His laughs turn to desperate shouts, and he has to be carried out of the room. Billy is taken to the hospital, tied down to a bed, and pumped full of morphine. The drug makes him jump ahead in time to 1948 when he is in a veterans’ hospital in New York. Billy voluntarily checked himself into a ward for nonviolent patients with mental health issues. Next to Billy is a man named Eliot Rosewater. Eliot introduces Billy to science fiction novels written by a man named Kilgore Trout. Billy and Eliot share a growing belief that life has no meaning. They struggle to come to terms with the horrors they witnessed during the war. Eliot confesses that he shot a teenage fireman whom he mistook for a German soldier. Billy remembers the shock and revulsion he felt in Dresden. Science fiction allows the men to rebuild their idea of the universe, as well as their ideas of themselves.

Billy jumps back to 1945 briefly before returning to the hospital. During a visit, his mother bores Billy. He jumps back to his prison hospital then forward again where he is visited by his fiancée Valencia Merble. Although she is very rich, Billy does not want to marry her. Eliot enters the conversation and discusses a Trout novel titled The Gospel from Outer Space. In the novel, an alien visits Earth and is inspired to write a brand-new Gospel. The new Gospel does not depict Jesus Christ as the son of God, so the humans decide to attack and kill the alien. Billy jumps ahead in time again and finds himself on Tralfamadore. He is stripped naked and housed in a zoo inside a large dome. The Tralfamadorians gather outside the dome and watch him. Billy follows a daily routine in which he eats, washes his dishes, exercises, trims his toenails, shaves, and uses deodorant. The zoo guide outside the dome uses telepathy to lecture the crowd on the human’s behavior. One day, a spectator asks Billy if he is happy in the zoo on Tralfamadore. Billy says that he is as happy on Tralfamadore as he was at home.

The Tralfamadorians do not seem to mind that humans commit murder or engage in wars. Billy reveals that the most valuable lesson he learned on the alien world is that a species can live together in peace. He gives a speech about the horrors, the murders, and the chaos that he witnessed on Earth and declares that humanity may be a threat to the safety and peace of the universe. The Tralfamadorians dismiss his concerns. They believe Billy is ignorant, given that they already know how the universe will come to an end. Their understanding of time allows them to see everything at once. Humans have nothing to do with the end of the universe. Instead, it will be caused by a Tralfamadorian experiment. Billy asks whether the Tralfamadorians could prevent this from occurring if they have prior knowledge. The aliens insist that nothing can be changed—time and the universe are built this way.

That night, Billy jumps back to his home in America where he has recovered and left the mental health hospital. Having graduated from college as an optometrist, Billy now treats people’s defective vision, even though everyone believes their vision of the world is defective. Billy and Valencia get married. On their wedding night, Billy jumps through a rapid string of experiences. He visits the hospital in the prison, the funeral of his father, an argument with his daughter, and the zoo on Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians decide to provide a mate for Billy. They present him with a woman named Montana Wildhack, who appeared in pornographic films on Earth. Though initially disinterested, Billy sleeps with Montana a week later. On the night that they have sex, Billy jumps back through time and space to his home in America.