The night before his daughter’s wedding day, Billy has trouble falling asleep. He has already traveled in time and knows he will be kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians’ flying saucer soon. The phone rings, and Billy hears the voice of a drunk who has dialed the wrong number. Downstairs, Billy watches a late-night documentary on American bombers and their gallant pilots in World War II. Slightly unstuck in time, Billy watches the movie forward and backward. Billy heads out to the backyard to meet the saucer that will arrive soon. Once on board, Billy is asked if he has any questions. He asks,“Why me?” They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber. Billy is then anesthetized. The crush of the spaceship’s acceleration sends him hurtling through time. He is back on a boxcar traveling across Germany. No one wants to let Billy sleep beside him because Billy yells and kicks in his sleep. By the ninth day of the boxcar journey, people are dying. Roland Weary, who is in another car, dies after making sure that everyone in the car knows who is responsible for his death: Billy Pilgrim. A car thief from Cicero, Illinois, named Paul Lazzaro swears he will make Billy pay for causing Weary’s death. On the tenth night, the train reaches its destination: a prison camp. The prisoners are issued coats, their clothes are deloused, and they are led to a mass shower. Among the prisoners is Edgar Derby. When the water begins to flow in the shower, Billy time-travels to his infancy. His mother has just given him a bath. He is then a middle-aged optometrist playing golf with three other optometrists. He sinks a putt, bends down to pick it up, and is back on the flying saucer. He asks where he is and how he got there. A voice reiterates that he is trapped in a blob of amber. The voice, which is Tralfamadorian, comments that only on Earth is there talk of free will. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will. In his zoo enclosure, Billy reads the novel Valley of the Dolls, the only earthling book available. Billy skips back to two childhood scenes during a family tour of the American West, then to the prison camp in Germany. After the prisoners are showered, their names are entered in a ledger, and they are officially alive again. The Americans are housed with a group of British officers who have accidentally received extra provisions. During a performance of Cinderella, Billy laughs uncontrollably and is taken to the camp’s “hospital.” He is drugged and wakes up in 1948, in the mental ward of a veterans’ hospital in New York. Billy has committed himself to the mental ward in his last year of optometry school. In the bed next to him lies an ex-captain named Eliot Rosewater. Eliot introduces Billy to the clever but poorly written science-fiction novels of a writer named Kilgore Trout. Back in Germany, Edgar Derby keeps watch over Billy’s sickbed. Billy remembers Derby’s death by firing squad, which happens in the near future. When Billy praises the peacefulness of Tralfamadore, the aliens inform him that Tralfamadorians are at war sometimes and at peace at others. They add that they know how the universe will end: one of their pilots will accidentally blow it up. They state that war cannot be prevented on Tralfamadore any more than it can on Earth. Billy skips back to his wedding night with Valencia in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. After they make love, Valencia asks Billy about the war. He gets up and goes to the bathroom and finds himself back in his hospital bed in the prison camp. Billy wanders to the latrine, where the American soldiers are violently sick. One of them is Kurt Vonnegut. The next morning, Paul Lazzaro appears at the hospital, knocked unconscious after trying to steal from an Englishman. Billy falls asleep and wakes up in 1968, back at work on his letter -to the paper. His daughter, Barbara, scolds him, notices that it is cold in the house, and leaves to call the oil-burner man after putting Billy to bed. Lying under his electric blanket, Billy travels to Tralfamadore, just as an actress named Montana Wildhack arrives and goes into hysterics. She has been brought to Tralfamadore to be Billy’s mate. The next day, Billy examines a boy whose father has been killed in Vietnam. He shares Tralfamadorian insights with the boy, whose mother realizes that Billy is insane. Billy’s daughter is called to take him home.
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