Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim, in Slaughterhouse-Five, is an American soldier in
Europe in the last year of World War II. What he sees and does during his six months on the battlefield and
as a prisoner of war have dominated his life. He comes to terms with the feelings of horror, guilt, and
despair that are the result of his war experiences by putting the events of his life in perspective. He
reorganizes his life by using the device of "time travel." Unlike everyone else, he does not live his life one
day after another. Billy Pilgrim has become "unstuck in time," and he jumps around among the periods of
life in a constant state of transience.
In the beginning of the novel, it is December 1944 and Billy, along with three other American
soldiers, is lost in a forest far behind enemy lines. Billy closes his eyes for a moment, drifts back to a day
in his past, then suddenly opens his eyes in the future: it’s 1965 and he is visiting his mother in a nursing
home. He blinks, then time changes to 1958, then 1961, and finally he finds himself back in the forest in
December 1944.
Billy does not have much time to wonder about what has just happened. He has been captured
almost immediately by German soldiers and put onto a train bound for eastern Germany. Aboard the train
Billy has a great adventure into the future. He finds himself at the night of his daughter’s wedding in 1967,
where he is kidnapped by a flying saucer from the imagina...

Kurt Vonnegut

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