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Were it all starts
Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, is born in Ilium, New York. He graduated high school in the upper third of his class. He attended one semester of optometry college before being drafted for WWII. -
Period: to
Slaughterhouse 5
Time span -
Drafted
Billy, unfit for actual combat, is a chaplain's assistant for an Army regiment in Germany. His entire unit had been bombed, leaving only him alive. He joined three other similarly stranded soldiers and decides to stick with them. Two scouts and a gunner named Roland Weary. The scouts leave them and are soon killed. Weary and Billy are then captured and brought to a POW camp. -
Captured
Roland Weary is severely beating Billy, and is just about to break his spine, when they get discovered by Germans who are in the process of "mopping up." The Germans loot them and escort them to a POW camp, where Billy and Roland meet the other POWs. The POWs are loaded onto a series of trains headed for Dresden, Germany. Billy falls asleep after being in a non-moving train car for two days and wakes up on the night of his abduction. -
The climax
The climax of the story takes place during the very last few weeks of the war. Billy, and the other POWs are rounded up by Germans again and marched back into Dresden with pickaxes and shovels to extract the bodies. The holes that they had made in the rubble were called corpse mines. Somewhere Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot. "Poo-tee-weet?" -
End of WWII
Billy is honorably discharged from the military, returns to Ilium, and marries the daughter of the founder of the Ilium School of Optometry. -
Unstuck in time
Billy blinks in 1965 and finds himself in 1958, at a banquet for Ilium's little league baseball team, in which his son Robert is a member. -
Here we go again
Billy blinks in 1958 and opens his eyes in 1961, at a party for optometrists. He blacks out drunk. -
Abducted
Billy is abducted by Tralfamadorians. Knowing exactly when he'll be abducted, because he's already seen it before, he decides to watch a movie an hour before the abduction. The movie plays backward.
After spending a few years on board the flying saucer, he has this conversation with one of the Tralfamadorians, which pretty much lays out the entire idea behind the story -
Hello Montana did you have a nice flight?
Inside the Tralfamadorian zoo, the human enclosure gets another resident: a movie star named Montana. She doesn't take the news of being abducted and put in a zoo nearly as well as Billy. -
Billy talks about his abduction
Billy, after returning home from the hospital, drives to NYC to be on a late-night radio talk show, where he discusses how he came unstuck in time. He also discusses how, in 1967, he was abducted by a race of fourth-dimensional aliens called "Tralfamadorians" and put in one of their zoos. -
Plane crash
Billy is involved in a plane crash in Vermont that kills everyone on board except him. Billy, after returning home from the hospital, drives to NYC to be on a late-night radio talk show, where he discusses how he came unstuck in time. He also discusses how, in 1967, he was abducted by a race of fourth-dimensional aliens called "Tralfamadorians" and put in one of their zoos.
