Slaughterhouse-Five recap

The novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an unremarkable American optometrist who survived the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war and who believes he has become unstuck in time, living the events of his life out of sequence. The book opens with the author describing his own decades-long effort to write about the massacre he witnessed. It then follows Billy as he ricochets between his youth, his wartime capture during a German offensive, his abduction by aliens called Tralfamadorians who see all of time at once, his prosperous postwar life, and the destruction of Dresden, where he and other prisoners survived in a meat locker beneath a slaughterhouse. Along the way the vengeful Paul Lazzaro vows to have Billy killed, and the decent teacher Edgar Derby is executed for taking a teapot from the ruins. Through Billy's fatalistic, Tralfamadorian outlook, summed up by the phrase so it goes, the novel treats war, death, and free will as things simply to be endured.

In the opening chapter the author speaks in his own voice about his long struggle to write a book about the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, which he witnessed as an American prisoner of war, and about the difficulty of describing such a massacre. The story then turns to Billy Pilgrim, a mild optometrist from Ilium, New York, who claims to have come unstuck in time and to live the events of his life in scrambled order. The reader jumps with him between his comfortable postwar existence, his abduction by aliens, and his experiences as a young chaplain's assistant in the war. Untrained and unfit for combat, Billy is lost behind enemy lines during a German offensive in the company of Roland Weary, a brutal, fantasy-driven soldier who alternately drags him along and torments him. The two are soon captured by German troops, and Weary bitterly blames Billy for their plight.

As the prisoners are marched and shipped by boxcar deeper into Germany, Roland Weary dies of an infected wound, still cursing Billy; another prisoner, the vengeful Paul Lazzaro, swears he will one day have Billy killed for it. Meanwhile, in the time-scrambled narration, Billy describes being taken to the planet Tralfamadore and exhibited in an alien zoo. The Tralfamadorians see all of time at once and regard death with detachment, an outlook captured in the phrase so it goes. The captured Americans reach a prison camp where cheerful British officers have long been held, then are sent onward by train to Dresden, a beautiful, seemingly untouched city that is not yet a military target. Among Billy's fellow prisoners is Edgar Derby, a decent middle-aged teacher who volunteered for the war. The Americans are housed in a disused slaughterhouse numbered five.

The narration keeps leaping across Billy's life: his survival as the sole passenger of a later plane crash, his postwar optometry career, and his eventual meeting with the obscure science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, whose books he has long admired. In Dresden, the American prisoners work in a syrup factory and are visited by Howard Campbell, an American who has become a Nazi propagandist and tries to recruit them. Then the firebombing comes: overnight, Allied aircraft destroy the entire city in a firestorm while Billy and the others survive by sheltering in a deep meat locker beneath the slaughterhouse. When they climb out, Dresden has been reduced to a lifeless expanse of rubble and ash.

The narration gathers Billy's later life together. His wife Valencia dies of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning while racing to the hospital after his plane crash, and while recovering there Billy meets a historian writing about the Dresden raid. Billy travels to New York, goes on a radio program, and publicly tells the story of Tralfamadore and of seeing his own future, convinced that he will eventually be murdered by an aging Paul Lazzaro making good on his vow. In the war's final stretch, after the bombing, the prisoners are put to work digging bodies out of the ruins of Dresden. Edgar Derby, the steady schoolteacher, is arrested for taking a teapot from the wreckage and is executed by a German firing squad for looting. Soon afterward the war in Europe ends, the guards disappear, and Billy and the others walk out into a silent spring, where a bird calls out.

The novel's threads converge on Billy Pilgrim's later years and the aftermath of Dresden. Billy's wife Valencia dies of carbon monoxide poisoning in a car while rushing to reach him after his plane crashes, leaving him the crash's sole survivor. Recovering in the hospital, he meets a historian researching the Dresden bombing. Billy goes public with his belief in the Tralfamadorians and their view of time, telling his story on the radio, and he claims already to know the moment of his own death: he will be shot years later by an assassin acting for the vengeful Paul Lazzaro. The book's wartime storyline ends just after the firebombing, with the prisoners digging corpses from the rubble. The kindly schoolteacher Edgar Derby is caught with a looted teapot and executed by firing squad. Then the war in Europe ends, the German guards vanish, and the surviving prisoners step out into a quiet, ruined springtime. The narrative closes on the sound of a bird's song, the only answer the book offers to the massacre.