... time on Trafalmadore. Billy is flat, un-emotional, and surprisingly for a protagonist, has very little dialogue. He's a young man in optometry school when he's drafted to the war. Upon his arrival in Germany, he meets the dimwitted bully Roland Weary, who targets Billy mercilessly. Eventually, ... introduces Billy to the noteless works of science fiction author Kilgore Trout. After shock treatments, his release from the hospital, and graduation from optometry school, he marries a woman named Valencia, has 2 children, and grows a successful optometry business. Fast forward many years to t...

• Word Count: 1646
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... time on Trafalmadore. Billy is flat, un-emotional, and surprisingly for a protagonist, has very little dialogue. He's a young man in optometry school when he's drafted to the war. Upon his arrival in Germany, he meets the dimwitted bully Roland Weary, who targets Billy mercilessly. Eventually, ... introduces Billy to the noteless works of science fiction author Kilgore Trout. After shock treatments, his release from the hospital, and graduation from optometry school, he marries a woman named Valencia, has 2 children, and grows a successful optometry business. Fast forward many years to t...

• Word Count: 1646
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

Author Kurt Vonnegut was very fortunate to have the bulk of his writing years occur during a time in history in which he wrote Slaughter House Five. If this book were written in present day, I fear it would be about as broadly circulated as a Kilgore Trout novel. Slaughter House Five is a fictitious as well as true narrative about WWII, of which the youth of this day have only an inkling of knowledge. Vonnegut's stark portrayal of war and its tragic aftermath would have been, at the time of its publication, a cathartic novel for those veterans suffering from leftover emotional scars received a...

• Word Count: 1541
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... two Billy Pilgrim believes that he has "come unstuck in time." He travels randomly through his own life with no control over his departure or destination or chronology. Born in 1922 in Ilium, New York, Billy grows up a funny-looking weakling. He graduates high school and begins ... 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 ...

• Word Count: 5323
• Approx Pages: 21
• Grade Level: High School

... 't even walk right-kept bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, driving everybody crazy, giving their position away. He was pitiful"" (Vonnegut 53). Billy Pilgrim does not get much love from the other, more experienced soldiers. A fight breaks loose when Billy and Roland Weary, the soldier who is looking after him ... killed. "He was down in the meat locker the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own...

• Word Count: 1265
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

... narrator, the author, is a very passive individual. This characteristic is brought even more to the forefront later in the novel. Chapter Two "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." He wanders from moment to moment in his life, experiencing chronologically jumbled events one right after another. He sees his ... and again about the Three Musketeers. He also asks that someone get revenge for him on the man who caused his death. He blames Billy Pilgrim, of course. The train finally arrives at a camp, and Billy and the other men are pushed and prodded along. The camp is full of ... By 2...

• Word Count: 7795
• Approx Pages: 31
• Grade Level: High School

... , he is taught that all time happens simultaneously, and therefore, nobody ever truly dies. At first this seems like a good thing, but to Billy Pilgrim, who cannot chose which aspects of his live to relive, brutal acts of war also live on forever. Billy repeatedly relives his time in Dresden, though ... uses dark irony in a very effective way, which not only disturbs the reader, but connects various events throughout the story. For example, a 44 year old high school teacher named Edgar Derby wanted to be able to fight in the war. He had some connections, and was able to get in. He survive...

• Word Count: 1466
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

... double pneumonia in a German railroad yard. He was slightly delusional. Valencia Merble - Billy's wife, daughter of Lionel Merble, the founder and owner of the Iliad School of Optometry where Billy studies to become an optometrist. She's a very fat and unattractive woman, but with a kind personality. She dies of carbon monoxide poisoning ... idea of being able to perceive the past, present, and future all at once has Billy fascinated. They are little men, with an arm raised up high with one eyeball in the palm of its hand. Roland Weary - An eighteen year old recruit anti-tank gunner. He s...

• Word Count: 1657
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

... argues that the loss of free will is affected by a parallel of controllable and uncontrollable events that occur in the life of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut argues that Billy's loss of free will results from his experiences in life, specifically, his childhood, marriage, and participation in war. The ... initiator. Through war, Vonnegut shows how free will is lost in several ways. One example is through death. While finishing high school and taking night classes at the Ilium School of Optometry, Billy is drafted into World War II and sent overseas where he is thrown into the B...

• Word Count: 971
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School

... born into a well-to-do family that was hit very hard by the Depression. Vonnegut went to public high school, unlike his two older siblings, and there gained early writing experience writing for the high school's daily paper. He enrolled at Cornell University in 1940, and, under pressure from his father and older ... Slaughter house Five" is a novel that is based almost completely off of Vonneguts experience in Dresdon. Billy Pilgrim experienced exactly what Vonnegut did in his own life. In many ways Vonnegut used Billy Pilgrim as a puppet to explain his own feelings and emotions from that...

• Word Count: 1839
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School