Book Summary

Billy Pilgrim jumps around in time to different points in his own life. This happens often, and is beyond his control. He goes from his birth and childhood to the moment of his death. In between he is a successful optometrist in Ilium, New York, the sole survivor of a plane crash, and a captive in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, where he is mated to an earthling porn star, Montana Wildhack.

Jumping around to all these places finally leads Billy to the pivotal event of his life: As a young chaplain's assistant in World War II, he is captured by the Germans, and is present for the apocalyptic firebombing of Dresden.

Is It Any Good?

"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." One of the all-time great opening lines in literature begins what is surely one of the strangest meditations on war. A cult favorite for more than 30 years, this mixture of adult historical war novel and science fiction, all leavened with the blackest of black humor, is very accessible to teens. For late (so it goes), great author Kurt Vonnegut, writing this was a kind of therapy. He was present at the Dresden firebombing, and those parts of the novel are based on his own experiences. But it took him a quarter century to bring himself to write it (the first chapter is really an Author's Note about how he finally came to do so), and he approaches that traumatic event gingerly, circling around it, holding it at a distance with humor and a matter-of-fact tone that fails to cover the pain.

Billy Pilgrim is one of those lucky doofuses, like Huck Finn, Chauncey Gardiner, and Forrest Gump. He zings back and forth through his life with enough spacey cluelessness that even finding himself on another planet barely fazes him. Or perhaps it isn't cluelessness, but a sort of Tralfamadorian Zen acceptance of each moment. Whichever, it makes him an appealing blank through whom the reader, and the author, can look at some of the horrendous things human beings do to one another.

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Publisher’s Details

Author

Kurt Vonnegut

# of pages

215

Publisher

Random House

Publication date

1/1/1969

Genre

Fiction - Science Fiction

Recommended reading level

15 - 17

Read aloud

14

Read alone

14

For Your Family