In chapter one Vonnegut writes in his own voice, introducing his experience of the firebombing of Dresden in World War II while he was a prisoner of war and his attempt for many years to complete a book on the subject. He begins with the claim that most of what follows is true, particularly the parts about war.

With funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, Vonnegut and his wartime friend Bernhard V. O'Hare return to Dresden in 1967. In a taxi on the way to the Dresden slaughterhouse that served as

On the way to Dresden, Vonnegut spends a night in a Boston hotel, where his perception of passing time becomes distorted, as if someone were playing with the clocks. He reads about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the bedside Gideon Bible and likens himself to Lot's wife, who against God's will looked back at the burning cities and was turned into a pillar of salt. Vonnegut muses on the book he has just written as an inevitable failure, and he resolves not to look back any more.

Chapter 7 starts nearly twenty-five years after his experience in Dresden, Billy boards a chartered plane with twenty-eight other optometrists, including his father-in- law, headed for a trade conference in Montreal. Valencia Pilgrim waves goodbye from the tarmac while eating a candy bar. The narrator informs us that according to the Tralfamadorians, Valencia and her father, like every other animal or plant, are both machines. Billy knows that the plane will crash. A barbershop quartet of optometrists called the "Four-eyed Bastards" serenades the passengers with bawdy tunes. One of them is a Polish song about coal miners, which makes Billy remember a public hanging he has witnessed in Dresden. At the hanging, a Polish man had been lynched for having sex with a German woman. Billy dozes off and drifts back to a moment in 1944. Roland Weary is shaking him; Billy tells the Three Musketeers to go on without him. The plane crashes into Sugarbush mountain in Vermont, and Billy survives with a fractured skull. Austrian ski instructors wearing black ski masks arrive on the scene. As they check for signs of life, Billy whispers "Schlachthof-Funf" ("Slaughterhouse-Five" in German), a phrase he learned in Dresden in order to communicate the address of his prison if he got lost. The ski instructors transport Billy down the mountain on a toboggan. A famous neurosurgeon operates on him, and Billy remains unconscious for two days afterward. The author tells us that Billy's convalescence is filled with dreams, some of them involving time travel. He goes back to Dresden and his first evening at the slaughterhouse, when he, Edgar Derby, and their young German guard Werner Gluck accidentally open a door onto a shower room full of beautiful naked girls. This is the first glimpse of female nudity Billy and Gluck have ever had. The three men finally make it to their intended destination, the prison kitchen. The cook regards their sorry condition and declares, "All the real soldiers are dead." Another Dresden time trip after his plane accident takes Billy to a factory that manufactures malt syrup. The POWs work there making the molasses-like concoction intended to serve as a nutritional supplement for pregnant women. All of the malnourished prisoners who work at the factory secretly eat the syrup themselves, scooping it out of the vats with spoons hidden in every corner of the building. Billy takes his first spoonful on his second day at work, and his scrawny body shivers with "ravenous gratitude." Billy hands a syrupy spoon through a window to Edgar Derby, who is working outside. Upon tasting the syrup, Derby bursts into tears of joy.

Many Germans have fled because they heard that the Russians were coming. Billy and a few other prisoners find a green, coffin-shaped wagon hitched to two horses, and they fill it with food and souvenirs. Outside the slaughterhouse, Billy remains in the wagon and dozes in the sun. It is a happy moment in his life. The sound of a middle-aged German couple talking about the horses awakens him. The animals' mouths are bleeding, their hooves are broken, and they are dying of thirst. Billy has been oblivious to their poor condition until now. The couple makes Billy get out and look at the animals, and he begins to cry his first tears of the war.

Billy is unconscious, time traveling, and oblivious to his wife's passing. In the next bed an arrogant Harvard history professor named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord is recovering from a skiing

Some topics in this essay:
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