Slaughterhouse-Five The Narrator Quotes

It's not just male war buffs who associate war with sex or who get some kind of pornographic excitement from violence. (See quote #5 for more on this.) Valencia is also getting kind of excited at the idea that Billy was in a war. But what do you make of the description of this association as "a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling"?

Whoa, there's a lot of sexual imagery in this description of "mopping up" a battlefield. And Montana Wildhack describes Edgar Derby's execution much later in the novel as a "blue movie"—a pornographic film (9.33). Why does the narrator seem to connect war and violence with sex?

Even as Weary is in the middle of a real war, he fantasizes about what the war should be like. It's stories like Weary's that terrify and anger Mary O'Hare in the first chapter of the book (see quote #2). What does the novel suggest motivates Weary's bullying behavior? How does Weary's upbringing compare to Billy's? Do the differences between the two explain the differences in their characters?

How does the narrator's treatment of his sons differ from Billy's treatment of Robert Pilgrim? Which do you think is the more ethically responsible? And why does Billy offer so little insight into Robert's character? He seems completely estranged from both his children. All this about Robert "straightening out and becoming a fine young man" reads more like a movie summary than a real assessment by a caring father of his son's character.

These are the words of real-life director Harrison Starr to the narrator in Chapter 1. Billy Pilgrim spends most of Slaughterhouse-Five trying to survive when he has no control over his own life.

The narrator himself seems to be struggling with a similar problem: how should he write a book against something he is pretty sure will never change? After all, if war and violence are part of human nature, how is Vonnegut supposed to imagine an alternative? But he tries... which is what distinguishes his character from Billy's.

For the first time, as Billy is faced with the possibility of his own death, he sees his life literally flashing before his eyes. How does the book take the idea of traumatic flashbacks and run with it? What purpose does Billy's time-travel serve in Slaughterhouse-Five?

If we could live life out of order and pick and choose what to experience, could we learn anything from the past? Is Slaughterhouse-Five trying to teach anything, or is it simply an effort to represent a series of conflicting ideas?

So the novel clearly distinguishes between the cure for Billy's existential angst—the Tralfamadorians—and whatever caused him to become unstuck from time. Billy's time-travel appears to be a symptom of his overall suffering. The moment he truly begins to realize he is in deadly danger behind enemy lines, he flashes forward beyond death, back before birth, and then to the moment when he almost drowned trying to learn to swim.

Billy isn't really laughing, though it looks that way; he's actually convulsing. Why does Weary decide to add to Billy's suffering by bullying him on the battlefield when they are both in danger? What does this say about Weary's character?

The reason for Billy's weeping may not be apparent to the doctor, but is it apparent to us? Beyond Billy's war experiences, what else might he have to cry about?

An "acrimonious madrigal" in this context is a loud, furious, multipart harmony of people yelling at Billy. No one in the POW train car wants to sleep next to Billy because he whimpers and kicks so badly in his sleep. Why does no one ever show any sympathy for Billy's suffering? How do you respond to Billy's extreme portrayal as helpless and childlike? How might this portrayal fit into other themes such as fate and free will or men and masculinity?

We can imagine someone justifying the firestorm of Dresden by saying, look, it's quid pro quo: the Germans were exterminating people, and the war had to be stopped as quickly as possible. But Vonnegut witnessed the deaths of thousands of noncombatants. He wants to find a way to talk about that experience, even though he knows that, as a country, Germany did terrible things during the war.

So he raises the issue of concentration camps to say that, yes, he knows—but still, aside from larger questions of morality, he saw the boiled bodies of schoolgirls. What could make that right or correct?

By comparing himself to Lot's wife, the narrator acknowledges, again, that Germany bore a lot of guilt for what was happening in the war. But that does not mean that it is not human and necessary to bear witness to the suffering of ordinary Germans, as witnessed by Vonnegut himself.

Billy claims to know his plane is going to crash, but he doesn't want to look like a fool by saying so. If he really did know, Billy could have saved a lot of lives, including his father-in-law's, by being willing to look like a fool. Billy survives the war by being lucky (and unselfconscious). When does he suddenly start to feel embarrassed or ashamed of himself?

This is a passing description of one of Kilgore Trout's novels, about a man and a woman in an alien zoo who are made to perform for the amusement of the aliens thanks to a bunch of fake stock information. When they think they have made money, they celebrate; when they think they have lost money, they get depressed. But there is no real money.

This seems comparable to the deluded dreams of Roland Weary, who firmly believes he is fighting a winning battle even as he is running around behind enemy lines just waiting to become a prisoner of war. The human ability to believe something against all evidence to the contrary seems pretty foolish to us.

Oh, hey, check it out—a reference to the title! Or anyway, the subtitle ("A Duty-Dance With Death"). Billy Pilgrim is completely, totally unprepared for war, with his poor physique, lack of gear, and messed-up shoes. But still, he is going because he has to: his dance with death has begun. And this dance is involuntary. As a soldier, Billy has no choice but to follow his orders, no matter how utterly ill-equipped he is for the battlefield. Billy may look like an idiot—or "preposterous," as the narrator calls him—but the real idiots are the guys back home who deployed him to the front lines of a war.

First off, we think it's hilarious that the narrator starts off his quoting spree with a dirty limerick. Second, we find it intriguing that he feels almost compelled to write about Dresden, even though it's difficult, and even though it's taking up valuable real estate in his brain. How might writing itself be a form of therapy? What other reasons does the narrator give for needing to write about the Dresden firestorm? And what does this limerick mean, anyway?

The narrator talks about Edgar Derby's real-life execution as though it were a moment of dramatic irony, as though the real war were also the product of an author with a dark sense of humor.

The narrator talks about writing 5,000 pages of his Dresden novel before actually getting to Slaughterhouse-Five. What makes the event so hard for him to write about? He describes the normal things that go into a novel—"climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations"—none of which Slaughterhouse-Five actually has. Why might a book filled with these things be precisely not what the narrator wants to write when tackling the topic of war?

The only sound left after a massacre is birdsong, so birds have the last word. Is this why the narrator also claims that his novel on Dresden must, inevitably, be a failure—because, in the end, there can simply be no words for such an event? Do you agree?