97 Fun Facts About Slaughterhouse-Five

Billy Pilgrim's son Robert, a teenage troublemaker, grows up to join which US special forces unit?

The Green Berets: the former troublemaker ends up fighting in the Vietnam War as a Green Beret.

What is Billy Pilgrim's job in the US Army during World War II?

Chaplain's assistant: barely trained, Billy never meets his chaplain or gets a proper helmet or boots, and ends up wandering lost behind German lines.

What does a filmmaker tell Vonnegut to write instead of an anti-war book?

An anti-glacier book: what he meant, Vonnegut explains, is that wars will always come and are as easy to stop as glaciers.

Which planet's inhabitants abduct Billy Pilgrim and put him on display in a zoo?

Tralfamadore: after a 1968 plane crash Billy tells a New York radio show about the abduction, and his daughter Barbara has to fetch him home.

Which three-word phrase does Slaughterhouse-Five repeat whenever a death is mentioned?

'So it goes' is what Billy's alien abductors say about the dead, since to them a person who dies is still just fine in plenty of other moments.

What does Roland Weary call himself and the scouts?

Three Musketeers: the name was news to the two scouts, who soon tell Weary that he and Billy are on their own.

What is the first sentence of Slaughterhouse-Five?

'All this happened, more or less.' The narrator hedges at once: the war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

What is the subtitle of Slaughterhouse-Five?

A Duty-Dance with Death: the main title names the Dresden slaughterhouse where Billy is held, whose underground meat locker shelters the prisoners from the firebombing.

To whom did Vonnegut promise to call the book The Children's Crusade?

Mary O'Hare, his war buddy's wife, said they had been babies in the war, so he promised a book with no part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

What does Billy Pilgrim do for a living after the war?

Optometrist: Billy marries the daughter of the optometry school's owner, whose backing sets him up in practice and makes him rich.

In which New York town does Billy Pilgrim live?

Ilium: after surviving a plane crash, Billy writes to the town's newspaper about the aliens who, he says, kidnapped him.

During which engagement is Billy captured by the Germans?

The Battle of the Bulge: lost behind German lines, Roland Weary is in the middle of beating Billy up when German soldiers find them.

How does Roland Weary die?

Gangrene from wounds caused by wooden clogs: his captors take his boots and make him march in clogs that cut into his feet.

What did fellow POW Paul Lazzaro do back home in Cicero, Illinois?

Stole cars: in the prison camp he tries to swipe cigarettes from a sleeping British officer, who wakes up and beats him.

For what crime do German soldiers execute Edgar Derby after the bombing?

Stealing a teapot: Derby, who had stood up to the American Nazi recruiter Howard Campbell, is shot for taking one from the ruins.

What was Edgar Derby's job before the war?

High school teacher: at forty-four, Derby had pulled political strings to get into the army.

In the veterans' hospital, which fellow patient introduces Billy to science fiction novels?

Eliot Rosewater: like Billy, he is haunted by what he saw in the war, and the two find the novels help them cope.

What is Kilgore Trout's day job?

Manages paperboys: his novels have never made money, so he gets by bullying the boys who deliver the local paper.

What do Billy's alien abductors look like to humans?

Upright toilet plungers: unable to sleep on his daughter's wedding night, Billy walks out to meet their flying saucer.

Who is placed in the zoo alongside Billy as his mate?

Montana Wildhack: a film star who vanished from Earth, she wakes up in the zoo beside Billy, and they have a child together.

What do Billy's alien abductors say only Earthlings ever talk about?

Free will: to beings who see every moment at once, things simply are the way they always will be, so there is nothing to choose.

How does Billy's wife Valencia die?

Carbon monoxide poisoning after a car crash: she is rushing to visit Billy, who has survived a plane crash, when she wrecks her own car.

With whom does Billy share a hospital room after the plane crash?

A Harvard history professor: at first he does not believe Billy was in Dresden, but in the end he is convinced.

How is Billy killed in 1976?

Shot with a laser gun by an assassin: Billy has just told a Chicago stadium crowd he is about to die, and the killer was hired by the elderly Paul Lazzaro.

Which prayer hangs framed on Billy Pilgrim's office wall?

The Serenity Prayer hangs there, yet among the things Billy cannot change, the book adds, are the past, the present and the future.

'If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, ask for' whom, according to a phrase Billy repeats to himself?

Wild Bob: a dying colonel, he invites the prisoners to a reunion in his hometown that he will not live to see.

American-born Nazi Howard W. Campbell Jr. is the protagonist of which other Vonnegut novel?

Mother Night: there Campbell turns out to be an American double agent whose Nazi radio broadcasts secretly pass coded information to the US.

Bertram Rumfoord is likely related to Winston Niles Rumfoord, a character from which Vonnegut novel?

The Sirens of Titan: there Winston flies his own spaceship into a time warp and comes out able to foresee the future.

What does the bird say in the last line of Slaughterhouse-Five?

'Poo-tee-weet?': there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, Vonnegut explains, so he gives the last word to a bird.

In Dresden, what does the factory where Billy and the other prisoners work produce?

Malt syrup: meant for pregnant women, it is so delicious that Billy sneaks a spoonful to Edgar Derby, who bursts into tears.

Whose 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden supplied Vonnegut's death toll of 135,000?

David Irving: his toll proved badly inflated, with the real figure no more than about 25,000, and he later became notorious for minimizing the Holocaust.

What did a North Dakota school board do with its Slaughterhouse-Five copies in 1973?

Burned them in a furnace: Vonnegut wrote to the board's chairman asking whether his letter, too, would be consigned to the fires of that furnace.

Which 1982 US Supreme Court case concerned removing Slaughterhouse-Five and other books from school libraries?

Island Trees v. Pico: by 5 to 4 the court went against the board, which had called the books anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.

How did the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library answer Republic High's 2011 ban of Slaughterhouse-Five?

Offered 150 free copies to students: an anonymous donor paid for the books so Republic High's students could read the novel and decide for themselves.

For which two science fiction awards was Slaughterhouse-Five nominated in 1970?

The Nebula and the Hugo: the novel won neither, but the 1972 film of it went on to win the Hugo for best dramatic presentation.

At which film festival did the 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five win the Jury Prize?

Cannes: some scenes were filmed in old Most, a Czech town then being torn down to mine the coal beneath it.

Who directed the 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five?

George Roy Hill: Vonnegut raved about his version, calling it a flawless translation of the novel to the silver screen.

Which pianist's recordings of Bach are used throughout the 1972 film?

The fourth Brandenburg concerto accompanies Billy's first sight of Dresden.

Which fairy tale do the English prisoners at Billy's POW camp stage as a play?

Cinderella: Billy laughs at it so hysterically that he is sedated with morphine, and he later wears the play's silver boots.

Looking for the kitchen, what do Billy, Derby and Werner Gluck walk in on?

Showering refugee girls: they had fled heavily bombed Breslau, only to die in the Dresden firebombing.

Slaughterhouse-Five lost both of its 1970 science-fiction award nominations to which novel?

The Left Hand of Darkness: Le Guin later turned against the novel's use of 'he' for its androgynous people.

How does Billy's father try to teach him to swim?

Throws him in the deep end: Billy sinks straight to the bottom of the pool, and someone has to rescue him.

What did Michael Palaia, Vonnegut's fellow POW near Dresden, take that got him executed?

A jar of food: the prisoners were clearing Dresden's rubble on near-starvation rations.

Billy Pilgrim ends up owning half of three stands selling which frozen treat?

Tastee-Freeze: yet for all his business wealth, Billy now and then weeps quietly for no apparent reason.

In 2013 Guillermo del Toro said he wanted to adapt Slaughterhouse-Five with which screenwriter?

Charlie Kaufman: del Toro wanted a more literal take than the 1972 film, feeling Vonnegut's play with time had been too edgy for film back then.

How do Billy's alien abductors say the universe will end?

A pilot tests a new fuel: Billy had expected Earthlings to be the threat, and the aliens cover their eyes at his stupidity.

Whose name is on the 'for President!' bumper sticker on Valencia Pilgrim's Cadillac?

Reagan: Valencia's sticker backs a man who failed to win the 1968 Republican nomination but later became president.

Where do Billy Pilgrim and his fellow prisoners shelter while Allied bombers destroy Dresden overhead?

A meat locker far below the slaughterhouse saves them, just as one saved Vonnegut himself when he sat out the real raid underground.

When Billy Pilgrim and the guards climb out after the firestorm, ruined Dresden is compared to the surface of what?

The moon is the comparison when they surface: no plants, no buildings, only charred rubble where the loveliest city the Americans had ever seen stood a day earlier.

Waiting for the flying saucer, Billy Pilgrim watches a television film about American bombers run in which unusual way?

Backwards is how the raid unfolds on his screen: planes fly in reverse, flames die down and bombs rise back into the bombers' bellies.

Two days after the war in Europe ends, the suffering of which animals finally makes Billy Pilgrim burst into tears?

Horses hauling his wagon had bleeding mouths and broken hooves, and a German couple scolded him for it. Until that moment he had not wept over anything he saw in the war.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, what does the sickly prisoner Paul Lazzaro call the sweetest thing in life?

Revenge is Lazzaro's creed: he keeps a list of enemies in his head and boasts that anyone can be killed for a thousand dollars plus expenses.

At Billy Pilgrim's wedding anniversary party, which performers upset him so badly that guests fear a heart attack?

A barbershop quartet, four men singing open-mouthed, reminds Billy of his four German guards after the Dresden raid, and the buried memory finally surfaces.

In Chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator likens himself to which biblical figure?

Lot's wife became a pillar of salt for glancing back at burning Sodom, and Vonnegut says he loves her for it because it was so human. He calls his own war book the work of a pillar of salt.

Asked why they chose him, Billy Pilgrim's alien captors say everyone is like a bug trapped in which substance?

Amber fixes an insect in one instant for ever, which is how his captors see every moment: it simply is, so asking why is pointless.

Which word did Kurt Vonnegut use for the 1972 screen version of Slaughterhouse-Five soon after its release?

Flawless was his verdict on the adaptation, and he added that he drooled and cackled every time he watched it.

The epigraph of Slaughterhouse-Five takes four lines about a baby who does not cry from which Christmas carol?

Away in a Manger suits Billy, who like the infant in the carol gets through the war without crying. The prisoners even sleep in a stable outside Dresden.

Billy Pilgrim is taken aboard a flying saucer hours after the wedding of which member of his family?

His daughter Barbara marries that day under an orange-and-black striped tent, the same colours that marked the prisoner trains as off-limits to Allied aircraft.

In New York City, Billy Pilgrim is gently thrown out of which place after describing his life on another planet?

A radio studio is hosting literary critics debating whether the novel is dead when Billy joins them, speaks about flying saucers and is eased out at the commercial break.

The last chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five opens with Robert Kennedy's shooting and names which other murdered leader?

Martin Luther King Jr. and Kennedy head a list of the dead that the narrator extends to the daily body counts announced from Vietnam.

Billy Pilgrim reports that his alien captors care little for Jesus Christ but greatly admire which Earthling scientist?

Charles Darwin appeals to them because they take him to teach that dying serves a purpose, a chilling fit with their fatalism about everything else.

As the boxcar doors open on Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator names which storybook realm aloud?

The Land of Oz is what the untouched skyline suggests to one prisoner, and the narrator reveals that the prisoner was himself, the author of the book.

Billy Pilgrim feels two lumps in the lining of his tiny prison-camp coat: a partial denture and which other object?

A diamond of two carats turns up beside the denture, war booty that Billy's fiancée Valencia is later seen wearing.

The Dresden building where Billy Pilgrim and the other prisoners sleep was built to hold which animals before slaughter?

Pigs once filled the cement-block shed in the idle Dresden stockyards, and the number painted over its door gave the book its title.

A guard tells Billy Pilgrim's group to memorise the German words Schlachthof-fünf as their what?

Address is all it was, the fifth building in the city stockyards, yet Billy whispers the same two words decades later when he is pulled from a wrecked aeroplane.

How does Billy Pilgrim's father die while Billy is on army maneuvers in South Carolina?

A hunting accident kills him during a deer hunt, and Billy is given leave for the funeral before being shipped overseas as a replacement.

Billy Pilgrim time-travels to a restaurant ovation as the newly elected president of which service organisation?

The Lions Club makes a wry choice, since the passive Billy is anything but a lion. He later hears a Marine major there urge the bombing of North Vietnam.

Billy Pilgrim is stumbling through the winter forests of which small European country when German soldiers capture him?

Luxembourg is where his regiment is shattered, leaving Billy lost for days in the snow with two scouts and a gunner, with no map and nothing to eat.

The chartered plane carrying Billy Pilgrim to a convention crashes into Sugarbush Mountain in which US state?

Vermont is where the aircraft comes down, killing everyone aboard except Billy and one of the crew; Billy knew it would happen and said nothing.

Who reaches the wreckage first after Billy Pilgrim's plane comes down, speaking a language that recalls his captivity?

Austrian ski instructors from a nearby resort move among the bodies speaking German, and the dazed Billy answers one of them with the name of his old prison.

In which part of New York City does Billy Pilgrim find four Kilgore Trout paperbacks in an adult bookstore window?

Times Square is where Billy wanders after checking into a hotel, and one of the paperbacks tells of an Earth couple kidnapped and put on show in an alien zoo.

When Dresden's buried bodies rot faster than prisoners can dig them out, what do German soldiers use to cremate them?

Flamethrowers are sent down into the cellars so the dead can be cremated where they lie, ending the digging that Billy and the other prisoners had been forced to do.

Billy Pilgrim digs for bodies in Dresden beside a soldier captured at Tobruk, who belongs to which people?

Maori is how the book identifies him, a New Zealander who dies of the dry heaves after being sent down into the stench of one of the cellars.

Howard W. Campbell Jr. visits the Dresden prisoners to recruit Americans into a German unit meant to fight whom?

The Russians are the only enemy he asks them to face, and he dangles a steak-and-potatoes meal and a passage home once the eastern front is won.

Roland Weary, the bully captured with Billy Pilgrim, grew up admiring his father's collection of what?

Torture devices are the family passion, and Roland, obsessed with them, saves Billy's life again and again in the hope of winning battlefield glory.

Unknown to either of them, how are Billy Pilgrim and his sixteen-year-old German guard Werner Gluck related?

Distant cousins is the fact the narrator slips in to explain why the boy looks so much like Billy, though neither of them ever finds out.

Bertram Rumfoord dismisses Billy Pilgrim's Dresden story as a symptom of which condition?

Echolalia, the echoing of whatever one hears, lets Rumfoord ignore an eyewitness: his official account treats the raid as a regrettable necessity, and Billy is an inconvenience.

Kurt Vonnegut, who lived through the Dresden raid as a prisoner of war, was born and raised in which US state?

Indiana shaped him: he grew up in Indianapolis, where a museum and library devoted to his work now stands.

Chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five recalls Kurt Vonnegut's postwar studies at the University of Chicago in which subject?

Anthropology shaped his fiction: he says it taught him to see nobody as simply bad, which is why his stories have no villains.

Kurt Vonnegut recalls in Slaughterhouse-Five working in public relations in Schenectady for which industrial giant?

General Electric hired him as a publicist in 1947, and the company inspired the automated factory town of his first novel, Player Piano.

Kurt Vonnegut joked that the Purple Heart he received after his months as a prisoner of war was for which ailment?

Frostbite earned him what he called his country's second-lowest decoration, a dry verdict from a man who had just lived through the destruction of a city.

Which award paid for Kurt Vonnegut's 1967 return to Dresden to research Slaughterhouse-Five?

A Guggenheim Fellowship sent him to East Germany with an old army friend, 22 years after the two had been prisoners there together.

Kilgore Trout returns as a main character in which Kurt Vonnegut novel, published four years after Slaughterhouse-Five?

Breakfast of Champions builds to a chance meeting between Trout and Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy Pontiac dealer in a fictional Ohio town.

Kilgore Trout, the failed novelist Billy Pilgrim befriends, was named in a nod to which real science fiction writer?

Theodore Sturgeon befriended Vonnegut in Massachusetts in the 1950s, and swapping one fish for another amused the younger writer. He confirmed the link only after Sturgeon died in 1985.

Billy Pilgrim's surname is widely read as an echo of which writer's 1678 allegory of a Christian's journey?

John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, whose hero strides toward salvation, while Vonnegut's unheroic drifter merely bounces between moments of his own life.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, a bumper sticker on a Pilgrim family Cadillac demands the impeachment of which Chief Justice?

Earl Warren, who led the Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969, was the target of a real-life campaign by the far-right John Birch Society.

Which unusual feature, later a trademark of his 1970s fiction, did Kurt Vonnegut add to Slaughterhouse-Five's pages?

His own drawings break up the text, a habit he took much further in the playful sketches that fill his next novel.

Why does an English officer tell Billy Pilgrim's fellow Americans they are lucky to be sent to Dresden?

It will not be bombed, he assures them, because Dresden is an open city with no war industries or troops worth attacking. About a month later it is destroyed.

Dresden, the city whose destruction haunts Slaughterhouse-Five, stands on which major European river?

The Elbe offers survivors of the raid no refuge in the book: American fighters swoop low and strafe people moving along its banks.

Writer Ryan North and artist Albert Monteys brought Slaughterhouse-Five to which medium for the first time in 2020?

Comics were new ground for the story until this graphic adaptation, which arrived half a century after the original was published.

In Chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator recalls outlining his Dresden story in crayon on the back of what?

A roll of wallpaper carried his proudest outline, with a different crayon colour for each character and orange cross-hatching where the lines met the firestorm.

Before his public relations career, the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five recalls working in Chicago in which job?

Police reporter for the City News Bureau was the post, and he recalls covering a man's grisly end in an elevator and remarking that he had seen far worse in the war.

Slaughterhouse-Five is dedicated in part to Gerhard Müller, whom Kurt Vonnegut met in Dresden in 1967 doing which job?

Taxi driver Gerhard Müller drove Vonnegut and an old army friend to the slaughterhouse that had been their prison, and later sent a Christmas card wishing for world peace.

Billy Pilgrim foresees giving his final speech, on flying saucers and the nature of time, in which Chicago venue?

A baseball stadium holds the crowd he calmly tells that he is about to die, having recorded the date years earlier on a tape kept in a safe deposit box.

Before revealing in 1995 that Billy Pilgrim was based on fellow soldier Joe Crone, what had Kurt Vonnegut waited for?

The man's parents to die was the condition he set himself, though friends had long known that the thin soldier who died in Dresden was the model.

In which US state did a judge bar Slaughterhouse-Five from classrooms in a town called Rochester?

Michigan was the setting: a judge barred the novel from Rochester's schools for its religious references, and in 1972 the state appeals court restored it in Todd v. Rochester Community Schools.

Which newcomer earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing Billy Pilgrim in the 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five?

Michael Sacks was up for Most Promising Newcomer, yet he quit acting in 1984 and built a second career in Wall Street technology.