Slaughterhouse-Five Chapter 1, Section 10 Summary

  • The narrator meets O'Hare's wife, Mary, who's a very nice lady. But for all of her niceness to his kids and her ease with entertaining, there's something that shows that she just doesn't like our narrator.
  • Mary brings the narrator and O'Hare into the kitchen to talk and leaves them to it, but she's obviously furious about something. She's banging around all over the house, walking around, opening and closing doors, even moving furniture.
  • O'Hare is embarrassed at his wife's anger. But he won't say why she's so peeved.
  • The narrator and O'Hare try to come up with some war stories but they can't think of anything good.
  • Mary finally comes into the kitchen for a soda. At last, she confronts our narrator. She yells that they were just babies when they went to war, but in his book, they'll seem like men. She thinks he's going to write some book glorifying their war experience. That book will be made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra and John Wayne, and it's going to make war seem like so much fun that they're going to have lots more.
  • Finally, the narrator gets it.