Summary
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could
not change were the past, the present, and the future.
See Important Quotations Explained
Weary and Billy’s captors, a small group of German irregulars,
take their valuables and discover an obscene photograph in Weary’s pocket.
As Billy lies in the snow, he sees an image of Adam and Eve in the
polished boots of the commander. Weary must surrender his boots
to a young German soldier, whose wooden clogs he receives in exchange.
The two Americans are brought to a house full of other captives.
Billy falls asleep and wakes up in 1967, in
the middle of administering an eye examination. We learn that he
has been falling asleep at work lately. He finishes with the patient
and tries unsuccessfully to interest himself in an optometry article.
Billy closes his eyes and is once more a prisoner. He
is roused and ordered to move. He joins a steady stream of POWs
marching in the road outside. A German war photographer stages a
capture scene of Billy emerging from a bush, surrendering to armed
Germans. Billy slips back into 1967. He is
driving on his way to a Lions Club luncheon through Ilium’s black
ghetto, still smoldering from recent riots, and then through a section
gutted for urban renewal. The destruction he sees outside the car
reminds him of the scene after the firebombing of Dresden. He drives
a Cadillac with John Birch Society bumper stickers. His son, Robert,
is a Green Beret in Vietnam. His daughter, Barbara, is about to
get married. He is quite wealthy.
At the Lions Club meeting, a marine major speaks about
bombing in North Vietnam. Billy has no opinion on this subject.
He has a plaque on his office wall that helps guide him through
such listlessness. It reads: “God grant me the serenity to accept
the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom always to tell the difference.”
After the luncheon, Billy returns to his stately home.
He lies down for a nap and finds himself weeping. A bed vibrator
called “Magic Fingers,” purchased to help Billy fall asleep, jiggles
him while he weeps. He closes his eyes and is back in Luxembourg, marching.
The wind makes his eyes water. Weary marches ahead of him, his feet
raw and bloody from his ill-fitting clogs. The prisoners march into
Germany and are taken to a railroad yard. A mentally unstable colonel
who has lost his whole regiment asks if Billy is one of his men.
The colonel, who likes to be called “Wild Bob,” tells Billy, “If
you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!” The soldiers
are sorted by rank and placed in crowded boxcars. They must take
turns sleeping and standing, and they pass a helmet as a chamber
pot. Billy is separated from Weary. His train does not move for
two days. When the train begins to roll toward the interior, Billy travels
to the night he is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians.
Analysis
Although the Serenity Prayer, inscribed on the plaque
in Billy’s optometry office, is an optimistic statement, it is undermined
by the text’s comment that “[a]mong the things Billy Pilgrim could
not change were the past, the present, and the future.” Such a comment plays
up Slaughterhouse-Five’s suggestion that any attempt
to change life is futile—that prayers and the invocation of supposed higher
beings cannot alter Billy’s immutable past, present, and future.
Though Billy enjoys the illusion of free will, since his existence
is characterized by all the components seemingly necessary for happiness—a
family, a comfortable home, and a successful business—life is still
meaningless for him. What he does not understand until his abduction
by aliens in 1967 is that he has no more
chosen a wife or a career in optometry than he has chosen to be
born a weakling. Vonnegut wryly lists the past, the present, and
the future as if they were small and inconsequential items on a
long laundry list detailing everything that neither Billy nor God
can change.
At this point in the novel, Billy shows signs of the
strain that comes from the hopelessness of war. He lacks the ability
to control his time-tripping, and he is often overcome by quiet
bouts of spontaneous and unexplainable weeping. Additionally, he
suffers from severe sleep disorders: he falls asleep in the middle
of examining patients, but once he is in bed he needs the help of
a Magic Fingers vibrator to fall asleep. Historically speaking,
the trauma of war frequently causes mental disorders in soldiers
who return from the front. This was true of soldiers who participated
in World War II as well as in other conflicts. Their symptoms, evidence
of mental illness, are typically characterized as post-traumatic
stress disorder. The mental problems that Billy manifests thus lend
an undercurrent of unreliability to his perspective.
