Summary
There was a drunk on the other end. Billy
could almost smell his breath—mustard gas and roses.
See Important Quotations Explained
On the night of his daughter’s wedding day, Billy cannot
sleep. Because he has traveled in time already, he knows he will
be kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians’ flying saucer in an hour. Billy
gets out of bed by the light of a full moon and wanders down the
hallway and into his daughter’s empty bedroom. The phone rings,
and Billy hears the voice of a drunk who has dialed the wrong number.
He can almost catch the scent of mustard gas and roses on the man’s
breath.
Downstairs, Billy picks up a half-empty bottle of champagne from
a table. He watches a late-night documentary on American bombers
and their gallant pilots in World War II. Slightly unstuck in time,
Billy watches the movie forward and backward. Planes fly backward,
magically quelling flames, drawing their fragmented bombs into steel
containers, and sucking them back up into their bellies. Guns on
the ground suck metal fragments from the pilots, crew, and planes. Weapons
are shipped backed to factories, where they are carefully disassembled
and broken down into their constituent minerals. The minerals are
shipped to specialists all over the world who “hide them cleverly”
in the ground, “so they never hurt anybody ever.” In Billy’s mind,
Hitler becomes a baby and all of humanity works toward creating
two perfect people named Adam and Eve.
Billy heads out to the backyard to meet the saucer that
will arrive soon. A sound like a melodious owl heralds the arrival
of the spacecraft, which is 100 feet in diameter.
Once on board, Billy is asked if he has any questions. He asks,
“Why me?”—a question that his captors think very typical of earthlings
to ask. They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply
is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in
amber.
Billy is then anesthetized. The crush of the spaceship’s
acceleration sends him hurtling through time. He is back on a boxcar
traveling across Germany. The men take turns sleeping and standing. No
one wants to let Billy sleep beside him because Billy yells and kicks
in his sleep. He thus sleeps standing up.
By the ninth day of the boxcar journey, people are dying.
Roland Weary, who is in another car, dies after making sure that
everyone in the car knows who is responsible for his death: Billy
Pilgrim. A car thief from Cicero, Illinois, named Paul Lazzaro swears
he will make Billy pay for causing Weary’s death.
On the tenth night, the train reaches its destination:
a prison camp. The prisoners are issued coats, their clothes are
deloused, and they are led to a mass shower. Among the prisoners
is Edgar Derby, a forty-four-year-old teacher from Indianapolis.
When the water begins to flow in the shower, Billy time-travels
to his infancy. His mother has just given him a bath. He is then
a middle-aged optometrist playing golf with three other optometrists.
He sinks a putt, bends down to pick it up, and is back on the flying
saucer. He asks where he is and how he got there. A voice reiterates
that he is trapped in a blob of amber. He is where he is because
the moment is structured that way, because time in general is structured
that way—because it could not be otherwise. The voice, which is
Tralfamadorian, comments that only on Earth is there talk of free
will.
