Slaughterhouse-Five: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Pilgrim asks for reading material on the trip to Tralfamadore and is given Valley of the Dolls. The Tralfamadorians give him several of their own planet’s novels on his request, which Pilgrim cannot read. But he observes how they are formatted: “in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars.” A Tralfamadorian explains that the books have “no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.” They are meant to be read “all at once.”

Pilgrim comes unstuck in time and is 12 years old, with his family by the Grand Canyon. He is terrified he will fall in. He is at Carlsbad Canyons in total darkness, and can see only his father’s radium watch dial. He is back in the POW camp, in the war. His clothes are de-loused but still dirty. He puts on his very small overcoat and realizes that it is filled with bullet holes. The POWs march and are entered into a ledger by the Germans, so that they are legally prisoners and therefore “alive.” An American “mutter[s] something which a guard did not like.” The German guard knocks down the American. The American asks why he has been selected for this punishment; the German answers, “Vy not?”

Pilgrim, Lazzaro, Derby, and others are led to a shed filled with British POWs who have been in the camp since the start of the war. They are officers who have already attempted to escape from other camps. Over their four years of imprisonment they have sung songs and exercised; they are happy and boisterous. The Red Cross has shipped them vast quantities of food because of a “clerical error.”

The Englishmen have known of the Americans arrival 12 hours in advance, and have been cleaning and preparing the camp. The Englishmen have prepared a large banquet for them with milk, soup, beef, and other delicacies. Billy is so dazed by this scene that he does not realize the hem of his coat has caught fire. It is put out by an Englishman, who tells Pilgrim the coat was a joke played on him by the Germans. Pilgrim faints from weakness and awakes to the Englishmen performing a rendition of the play Cinderella.

Billy finds a part of the play so hilarious that he cannot stop laughing. He is carted into the camp’s medical quarters, sedated, and put on bed rest. Derby watches over him and reads The Red Badge of Courage. Billy has a dream that he is a giraffe living with other giraffes. After coming unstuck in time, Billy awakes in a veteran’s nonviolent mental hospital in 1948, where he has voluntarily checked in after his breakdown just before finishing optometry school. The doctors who admit him don’t believe his breakdown has to do with war trauma, but rather with his father forcing him to swim and visit the Grand Canyon in his youth.

In the bed next to Billy is Eliot Rosewater, checked in for alcohol abuse. Rosewater introduces Billy to the science fiction writings of Kilgore Trout, an author of cheap paperbacks. Both Rosewater and Billy “found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war.” Thus science fiction allows them to “re-invent themselves and their universe.” Billy becomes an avid fan of Trout’s work. Rosewater says The Brothers Karamazov contains everything one ought to know about life, but that the book “isn’t enough anymore.”

When Billy’s mother visits the ward, he hides his head under the blankets until she leaves. Rosewater speaks with her instead. Rosewater suggests that perhaps Billy, who is about to finish optometry school, is overworked. Rosewater is reading a Trout book entitled Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, which argues that mental diseases are not of the three visible dimensions and therefore difficult for human doctors to understand.

Billy comes unstuck and is back in the war. Derby is still reading to him and Billy sees Derby’s execution in the near future. An English officer comes in to check on Billy. He tells Derby that, when the US prisoners shaved, he realized the war was “fought by babies”—“a Children’s Crusade.” Derby tells briefly of how he was captured after a period of intense German shelling.

Billy’s fiancée Valencia, the daughter of a wealthy optometrist, is visiting the mental ward in 1948. She offers him a Three Musketeers bar. Rosewater is reading about Tralfamadorian-like aliens who study Christianity on earth. The alien says the problem with Christianity is Jesus’ power, and the alien then describes an alternate Gospel where Jesus is a “nobody” who is later adopted by God on the cross. This is designed to reinforce the message that it’s not OK to hurt anyone, rather than the message of the original Gospels, which argue against hurting a “well-connected” person. Rosewater complains that Trout is a bad prose stylist; “only his ideas [are] good.”

Rosewater compliments Valencia’s diamond, which Billy took as booty in the war. Billy comes unstuck and is 44 years old, on display in a zoo on Tralfamadore. The natives are examining his naked body. His habitat has been set up with furniture taken from a Sears store in Iowa. The Tralfamadorians find Billy beautiful, as he exercises and eats, because they have seen no other humans. On Tralfamadore, Billy learns, there are five sexes, and on Earth there are seven, only these differences exist in the fourth dimension and cannot be seen by humans.

While Billy is on display in the zoo, a Tralfamadorian guide uses metaphors to explain to fellow aliens how Billy understands time. In one, Billy is strapped to a railcar and can only see through a small hole in a metal sphere. He does not know the railcar is moving, nor how fast. Billy later asks the Tralfamadorians how they have managed to live in a world without war. A Tralfamadorian answers that they know the Universe is destroyed “while [they are] experimenting with new fuels for flying saucers.” This event has always happened and will happen, therefore it cannot be prevented. Thus Tralfamadorians focus only on pleasant moments.

Billy comes unstuck and is making love to his wife on their wedding night. A green and orange boat, appearing orange and black in the night, glides outside their apartment. Valencia promises to lose weight for Billy—he sees their whole marriage, present and future, and realizes that things will be mostly tolerable. They lie together. Valencia says she feels Billy is “full of secrets.” Billy imagines an epitaph that Vonnegut thinks also describes himself: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” Valencia asks Billy about Derby’s execution.

Billy comes unstuck and is in the POW hospital in 1944. Derby is asleep. Billy wanders outside, dancing, and becomes snagged on a fence, only to be freed by a Russian prisoner who is out at night to use the bathroom. Billy follows the sounds of crying toward the camp latrine. The rich food of the banquet has made many of the POWs ill. One man cries that he has passed everything except his brains, then passed his brains. Vonnegut steps in to say that that man is he, Vonnegut. Billy wanders back to Valencia and his wedding night.

Back in the war, Lazzaro is carried into the sick-room; his arm was broken by an Englishmen when Lazzaro attempted to steal his cigarettes. A German officer comes in to talk to the Englishmen and reads from a book by an American, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., who has become a propagandist for Nazi Germany. In this book, Campbell argues that Americans are mostly poor, uncouth, and terrible liars.

Billy travels to 1968. His daughter Barbara is angry that he has been writing to newspapers about Tralfamadore. She turns the heat on, although Billy does not notice he has been cold. He travels to Tralfamadore, where he has been given a companion in the zoo, a Hollywood star named Montana Wildhack. Billy is kind to Montana, and they begin having a romantic relationship. Billy is back in 1968 in Ilium. He decides to return to work, where he tells a boy, whose father was recently killed in Vietnam, that his father would always remain alive. The boy’s mother complains, and Barbara worries about Billy once more.