In chapter 2 of slaughterhouse five, the author talks about Billy Pilgrim who can go back in time and do everything he once did. Billy was in a plane crash and he was the only surviver. A few days later his wife died of carbon-monoxide moisoning. The phrase "So it goes" always is said after something bad happens. Billy started talking about how aliens abducted him and took him to the planet Tralfamadore. Everyone thought he was going crazy, so they wanted to take care of him. Billy describes his entry into the army, and his dazed trek behind enemy lines after the disastrous Battle of the Bulge in World War II.
After the battle, Billy falls in with three other American soldiers, two of whom are scouts and capable soldiers. The antitank gunner Roland Weary, is a cruel, insecure man who saves Billy’s life repeatedly in acts that he thinks will make him a hero. Billy first time-shifts as he leans against a tree in a Luxembourg forest. He has fallen behind the others and has little will to continue. He swings through the extremes of his life: the violet light of death, the red light of pre-birth. He is then a small boy being thrown into the deep end of the YMCA swimming pool by his father. Billy time-travels to 1965. He is now forty-one years old and visiting his mother in a nursing home. He blinks and finds himself at a Little League banquet for his son, Robert, in 1958. He blinks again and opens his eyes at a party in 1961, cheating on his wife. Messily drunk, he passes out and wakes up again behind enemy lines. Roland Weary is shaking him awake. The two scouts decide to ditch Weary and Billy. All his life people have ditched him. He has imagined himself and the scouts as the Three Musketeers, and he blames Billy for breaking them up. Billy is suddenly giving a speech in 1957 as the newly elected president of the Ilium Lions Club. He is then back in the war, being captured by Germans along with Weary.
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