Slaughterhouse-Five Study Guide

Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade : A Duty-dance with Death (1969) is a novel by Kurt Vonnegut. One of his most popular works and widely regarded as a classic, it combines science fiction elements with an analysis of the human condition from Absurdist perspectives, using time travel as a plot device. The bombing of Dresden in World War II, the aftermath of which Vonnegut witnessed, is the starting point.

Quotes

All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition printed in December 1991 by Dell, ISBN# 978-0-440-18029-6

• This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.
  • Epigram

• So it goes.
  • Recurring statement throughout the novel, on life, death, and mortal existence, based on what Tralfamadorians say whenever someone or something dies.

• The smell of mustard gas and roses.
  • Repeated quote in various places in the novel to describe either a drunkard's breath or the smell of rotting corpses.

Chapter 1

• "I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby," I said. "The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad." (pp. 4-5)

• The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought. (p. 11)

• "You were just babies then!" she said."What?" I said.

  "You were just babies in the war— like the ones upstairs!"

  I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood."But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.

  "I— I don't know," I said.

  "Well I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be portrayed in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

  So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

  "I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it The Children's Crusade."

  She was my friend after that.

  • The wife of an old war buddy accusing the author, who is writing a book about the destruction by bombing of Dresden, Germany in World War II (pp. 14-15)

• I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. (p. 18)

• It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?"
  • Vonnegut, as narrator, addresses his publisher Seymour ("Sam") Lawrence directly about his book (p. 19)

• I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that. (p. 19)

• And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes. (pp. 21-22)

• People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

  This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:

  "Listen:Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."

  It ends like this:

  "Poo-tee-weet?" (p. 22)

Chapter 2

• Listen:Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

• The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."
  • Billy writing a letter to a newspaper describing the Tralfamadorians (pp. 26-27)

• As part of the gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger— from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty. The gun lapped up snow and vegetation with a blowtorch thirty feet long. The flame left a black arrow on the ground, showing the Germans exactly where the gun was hidden. The shot was a miss. (p. 34)

• Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. (p. 39)

Chapter 3

• Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: "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."Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. (p. 60)

• If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob! (p. 67)

Chapter 4

• American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

  When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

  The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed. (pp. 74-75)

• Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?""That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you ? Why us for that matter? Why ? Because this moment simply . Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?" anything is

  "Yes." Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

  "Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no ." (pp. 76-77) why

• All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber. (p. 86)

• "If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will." (p. 86)

Chapter 5

• There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
  • A Tralfamadorian explains a Tralfamadorian novel to Billy (p. 88)

• The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State. (p. 96)

• [Eliot] Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy [Pilgrim] one time… He said that everything there was to know about life is in "The Brothers Karamazov," by Fyodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough

• She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all. (p. 102)

• How nice— to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive. (p. 105)

• You know— we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.'" (p. 106)

• It was The Gospel From Outer Space , by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space... [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.But the Gospels actually taught this:

  Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...:

  Oh, boy— they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. was So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

  And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this:

  From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections! (pp. 108-110)

• Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. (p. 122)

• An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book. (p. 125)

• Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times. (p. 129)

Chapter 6

• "Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut," murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. "Go take a flying fuck at the moon." (p. 147)

Chapter 8

• Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer. (p. 167)

• "Did that really happen ?" said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn't had even one baby yet. She used birth control. (p. 171)

• “I’m not the only one who’s listening. God is listening, too. And on Judgment Day he’s going to tell you all the things you said and did. If it turns out they’re bad things instead of good things, that’s too bad for you, because you’ll burn forever and ever. The burning never stops hurting.”Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that, too, and was petrified.

  Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie’s cleavage. (p. 172)

• "You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it?" Trout asked Billy."No."

  "The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he'll realize there's nothing under him. He thinks he's standing on thin air. He'll jump a mile

Chapter 9

• Billy didn’t really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it. Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease. (p. 192)

• Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see. He kept silent until the lights went out at night, and then, when there had been a long silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord, "I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war." (p. 193

• Billy turned on his television set, clicking its channel selector around and around. He was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to appear. But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after eight o’clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder. So it goes. (pp. 199-200)

Chapter 10

• My father died many years ago now—of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust. (p. 210)

• "Poo-tee-weet?" (p. 215; closing words)