Slaughterhouse Five

SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE

-Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and as a prisoner of war in Germany witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired the classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He has written thirteen other novels and currently he resides in New York City.

The story of Billy Pilgrim

Billy Pilgrim was born in 1922 in Ilium in New York, the only child of a barber there. He was a funny looking child with a tall and weak structure. His schooling was in Ilium and he was doing his first semester of optometry when he was enlisted for the war. He was first a valet to the war chaplain and then he had to go back to his home because of his father’s death. His father had died of a bullet wound caused by a friend with whom he was out deer hunting. His father had been a very sadistic character, one who liked to scare the wits out of his son. He once dropped a three-year-old Billy into the deep end of a pool so that li’l Billy might learn swimming and he also took the little boy to the edge of the Grand Canyon where he wet himself out of fear. Billy’s mother on the other hand was sweet and mature and cared a lot about her son.

When he went back to the war he served in Europe and there all of his Infantry except two scouts, an anti tank gunner and himself where shot down in the famous Battle of the Bulge. Billy was the weakest in the group with very less warm clothes on and his one shoe had lost a heel, which resulted in him bobbing up and down. Billy wanted to give up due to his pitiable condition but Roland Weary, the anti tank gunner forced him to go on although he considered Billy to be a menace to the two scouts and himself, collectively called as “the three musketeers” by Weary himself. They were traveling through a forest when Billy first came unstuck in time. Coming “unstuck”