Slaughterhouse-Five Chapter 2, Section 17 Summary

  • Weary is 18 years old and from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
  • He has had an unhappy childhood: he is not popular in Pittsburgh because he's a stupid bully.
  • Weary likes to attach himself to people even less popular than him, pretend to be friends for a while, and then beat the crap out of them.
  • He has done this over and over again.
  • Weary's father, a plumber, collects torture instruments and weapons.
  • He once gave Weary's mother a working thumbscrew as a paperweight and a lamp with a model of the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg as its base. The Iron Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a human-sized hinged metal cabinet shaped like a woman on the outside and lined with spikes on the inside. It had a drain in the bottom for blood.