Note: Billy
Pilgrim, the novel’s protagonist, has become “unstuck in time.”
He travels between periods of his life, unable to control which
period he lands in. As a result, the narrative is not chronological
or linear. Instead, it jumps back and forth in time and place. The
novel is structured in small sections, each several paragraphs long,
that describe various moments of his life.
Billy Pilgrim is born in 1922 and
grows up in Ilium, New York. A funny-looking, weak youth, he does
reasonably well in high school, enrolls in night classes at the
Ilium School of Optometry, and is drafted into the army during World
War II. He trains as a chaplain’s assistant in South Carolina, where
an umpire officiates during practice battles and announces who survives
and who dies before they all sit down to lunch together. Billy’s
father dies in a hunting accident shortly before Billy ships overseas
to join an infantry regiment in Luxembourg. Billy is thrown into
the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and is immediately taken prisoner
behind German lines. Just before his capture, he experiences his
first incident of time—shifting: he sees the entirety of his life,
from beginning to end, in one sweep.
Billy is transported in a crowded railway boxcar to a POW camp in
Germany. Upon his arrival, he and the other privates are treated to
a feast by a group of fellow prisoners, who are English officers who
were captured earlier in the war. Billy suffers a breakdown and gets
a shot of morphine that sends him time-tripping again. Soon he and
the other Americans travel onward to the beautiful city of Dresden,
still relatively untouched by wartime privation. Here the prisoners
must work for their keep at various labors, including the manufacture
of a nutritional malt syrup. Their camp occupies a former
slaughterhouse. One night, Allied forces carpet bomb the city, then
drop incendiary bombs to create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen
into the blaze, asphyxiating or incinerating roughly 130,000 people.
Billy and his fellow POWs survive in an airtight
meat locker. They emerge to find a moonscape of destruction, where
they are forced to excavate corpses from the rubble. Several days
later, Russian forces capture the city, and Billy’s involvement
in the war ends.
Billy returns to Ilium and finishes optometry
school. He gets engaged to Valencia Merble, the obese daughter of
the school’s founder. After a nervous breakdown, Billy commits himself
to a veterans’ hospital and receives shock treatments. During his
stay in the mental ward, a fellow patient introduces Billy to the
science fiction novels of a writer named Kilgore Trout. After his recuperation,
Billy gets married. His wealthy father-in-law sets him up in the
optometry business, and Billy and Valencia raise two children and
grow rich. Billy acquires the trappings of the suburban American
dream: a Cadillac, a stately home with modern appliances, a bejeweled
wife, and the presidency of the Lions Club. He is not aware of keeping
any secrets from himself, but at his eighteenth wedding anniversary
party the sight of a barbershop quartet makes him break down because,
he realizes, it triggers a memory of Dresden.
The night after his daughter’s wedding in 1967,
as he later reveals on a radio talk show, Billy is kidnapped by
two-foot-high aliens who resemble upside-down toilet plungers, who
he says are called Tralfamadorians. They take him in their flying
saucer to the planet Tralfamadore, where they mate him with a movie actress
named Montana Wildhack. She, like Billy, has been brought from Earth
to live under a transparent geodesic dome in a zoo where Tralfamadorians
can observe extraterrestrial curiosities. The Tralfamadorians explain
to Billy their perception of time, how its entire sweep exists for
them simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When someone dies,
that person is simply dead at a particular time. Somewhere else
and at a different time he or she is alive and well. Tralfamadorians
prefer to look at life’s nicer moments.
When he returns to Earth, Billy initially
says nothing of his experiences. In 1968,
he gets on a chartered plane to go to an optometry conference in
Montreal. The plane crashes into a mountain, and, among the optometrists,
only Billy survives. A brain surgeon operates on him in a Vermont
hospital. On her way to visit him there, Valencia dies of accidental
carbon monoxide poisoning after crashing her car. Billy’s daughter
places him under the care of a nurse back home in Ilium. But he
feels that the time is ripe to tell the world what he has learned.
Billy has foreseen this moment while time-tripping, and he knows
that his message will eventually be accepted. He sneaks off to New
York City, where he goes on a radio talk show. Shortly thereafter,
he writes a letter to the local paper. His daughter is at her wit’s
end and does not know what to do with him. Billy makes a tape recording
of his account of his death, which he predicts will occur in 1976 after
Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by the Chinese. He knows exactly
how it will happen: a vengeful man he knew in the war will hire
someone to shoot him. Billy adds that he will experience the violet
hum of death and then will skip back to some other point in his
life. He has seen it all many times.
