Slaughterhouse Five

1. Slaughterhouse Five • News Feed From the book Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float by Sarah Schmelling

2. Billy Pilgrim is on planet Tralfamadore with a bunch of creatures shaped like toilet plungers. • Barbara Pilgrim: I thought we talked about this. • Billy: What is it about this that makes you so mad? • Barbara: None of it’s true! There is no such planet! • Billy: It can’t be detected from Earth, if that’s what you mean.

3. Barbara isn’t sure what to do with her father. • Billy: I’m unstuck in time. • Barbara: Is that so. • Billy: Yes, in fact, I was just at a banquet for your brother’s Little League team. Before that I was in a forest in World War II. Then I was back in the womb. • Barbara: Please don’t lie to me. • KurtVonnegut: This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano. • Barbara: What’s going on? • Kurt Vonnegut: Barbara is a bitchy flibbertigibbet. • Barbara: I’m going to log off for a while.

4. Billy is drunk in the backseat of his car. • Billy sent a Tell Me Where My Steering Wheel Is So I can Drive Home request. • Billy received a Standing Ovation fromthe Lions Club. • Billy added Frozen European Creek Bed in World War II to his Places I Didn’t Plan on Visiting. • Billy received The Crap Beat Out of Him from Roland Weary.

5. Billy is rich as Croesus. • Billy removed “staying awak during patient visits at my optometry office” from his Activities. • The Germans added Billy to their Prisoners of War. • Billy became a fan of “Magic Fingers” Bed-Vibrator Machines. • Billy took a What Kind of Earthling Are You? quiz with the result “Fine Specimen.”

6. Billy is nestled like spoons with a hobo. • Billy saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. • Billy added “If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!” to his Favorite Quotations. • Kurt Vonnegut added “So it goes” to his Effective Rhetorical Devices. • The Germans sent Billy a Coat That’s More Like a Three-Cornered Hat with Gummy Stains and a Dead, Furry Animal Frozen to It.

7. Billy says that to the Tralfamadorians, the heavens look like they’re filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. • Billy added “have spent time as a Nonviolent Mental Patient” to his About Me. • Billy is twelve years old, terrified, and standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. • Billy is being deloused. • Billy is attending The Saddest-Ever Version of Cinderella.

8. Billy received His Own Time of Death. • KurtVonnegut: So it goes. • Billy became a fan of Kilgore Trout. • Billy is now married to Valencia Merble. • ValenciaMerble joined the group Women with Carbon Monoxide Intolerance. • KurtVonnegut: So it goes. • Billy is loony with time travel and morphine.

9. Billy received a Mating request from Montana Wildhack, motion picture star. • Billy is being patronized by a Blue Fairy Godmother. • Billy took a leak in the simulated earthling habitat of the Tralfamadorian zoo. The crowd went wild. • Barbara: Did you hear what I said? If you’re going to act like a child, maybe we’ll just have to treat you like a child. • Billy: That isn’t what happens next. • Barbara: We’ll see what happens next.

10. Billy is leading a sad parade of American prisoners through the streets of Dresden wearing a blue toga and silver shoes, with his hands in a muff. • Billy is boarding a plane that he knows is going to crash, but he doesn’t want to make a fool of himself by saying so. • Billy added “Making (while eating a lot of) malt syrup” to his Activities.

11. Billy is now friends with Kilgore Trout. • Billy is crying his eyes out at a barbershop quartet. • Billy is attending the Bombing of Dresden via Meat Locker. • Billy doesn’t have echolalia. • Billy is snoozing in the back of a wagon.

12. Billy suddenly wants to tell the world the lessons he learned on Tralfamadore. • Barbara is putting Billy to bed and turning on the Magic Fingers. • Barbara: Don’t go anywhere Dad. • Billy is sneaking out and going to New York to go on the radio and tell the world about Tralfamadore.

13. Billy posted a Note. • --I’m going to die February 13, 1976. So it goes. • --That’s okay--to the Tralfamadorians, it’s just one moment in time and I’ll still be alive elsewhere. • --The Tralfamadorians ignore the awful moments and concentrate on the good ones.

14. KurtVonnegut is grateful, then, that so many of his moments are nice. • Billy was told that Tralfamadorian novels are a series of urgent messages with no particular relationship to each other, but that when seen all at once make something beautiful. • KurtVonnegut wrote a Tralfamadorian novel. • KurtVonnegut is not a fan of war.

15. KurtVonnegut said at the start of his story that there’s nothing to say about a massacre, when everything is supposed to be quiet, except for the birds that say “Poo-tee-weet?” • Billy woke up one day in Dresden, and World War II was over. • A Bird: Poo-tee-weet?