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50 free Slaughterhouse-Five trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Slaughterhouse-Five trivia quiz covers Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel about an optometrist who has come unstuck in time and the firebombing he survived in a Dresden meat locker. The easy questions cover the hero's name and profession, the planet that abducts him, the phrase repeated after every death, the city that burns and the author's own war. From there the quiz moves through the plot: Roland Weary and his clogs, Paul Lazzaro's revenge list, the honeymoon in Cape Ann, the plane crash in Vermont, Valencia's carbon monoxide, Montana Wildhack in the zoo dome, Edgar Derby's teapot and the assassination in a Chicago stadium in 1976. The hard end covers the frame and the afterlife of the book: the subtitle promised to Mary O'Hare, the first line ranked among the hundred best, the Beowulf echo of 'Listen', the 106 repetitions, the David Irving death toll Vonnegut borrowed, the North Dakota furnace, the Supreme Court case, the Cannes prize for the 1972 film, the Steppenwolf stage version and the characters on loan from Mother Night and The Sirens of Titan. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for Slaughterhouse-Five and its 1972 film before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Kurt Vonnegut, classic novels and World War II quizzes are natural next stops.
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Q 01Who wrote Slaughterhouse-Five?
Kurt Vonnegut
He was himself a prisoner of war in the city when it was firebombed.
Q 02What is the name of the novel's protagonist?
Billy Pilgrim
He is a chaplain's assistant in the war and later a wealthy professional in upstate New York.
Q 03In which month and year does the firestorm the prisoners survive take place?
February 1945
The German guards hid their captives in a partly underground slaughterhouse.
Q 04What is the name of the planet whose inhabitants abduct Billy and put him in a zoo?
Tralfamadore
They see in four dimensions and observe every moment of time at once.
Q 05Which three-word phrase does the narrator repeat whenever a death is mentioned?
'So it goes'
It appears 106 times, serving as refrain, transition, memento mori and comic relief.
Q 06How many times does the death refrain appear in the novel?
106
Vonnegut said his books are mosaics of tiny chips, and each chip is a joke.
Q 07What is the novel's famous first sentence?
'All this happened, more or less.'
American Book Review ranked it 38th among the hundred best first lines in 2010.
Q 08What is the novel's subtitle?
A Duty-Dance with Death
The full title also includes The Children's Crusade, a name promised to Mary O'Hare.
Q 09To whom did Vonnegut promise to call the book The Children's Crusade?
Mary O'Hare, his war buddy's wife
She complained they had been babies in the war and feared a book with parts for Frank Sinatra and John Wayne.
Q 10What is the protagonist's peacetime profession?
Optometrist
He marries Valencia Merble, whose father owns the town's school of optometry.
Q 11In which fictional New York town does Billy live?
Ilium
The failed science-fiction writer he befriends lives there too, managing newspaper delivery boys.
Q 12During which engagement is Billy captured by the Germans?
The Battle of the Bulge
He had been sent from a base in South Carolina to the front line in Luxembourg.
Q 13How does Roland Weary die?
Gangrene from wounds caused by wooden clogs
The Germans confiscated his boots; on the train he convinces Paul Lazzaro that Billy is to blame.
Q 21How many inhabited planets had the Tralfamadorians visited without finding talk of free will?
Thirty-one
They had also studied reports on a hundred more.
Q 22How does Billy's wife Valencia die?
Carbon monoxide poisoning after a car crash
She was rushing to the hospital in Vermont where Billy lay after his plane crash in 1968.
Q 23With whom does Billy share a hospital room after the plane crash?
A Harvard history professor writing a USAAF war history
Q 14How much does Paul Lazzaro claim he can have anyone killed for?
A thousand dollars plus travelling expenses
He is a sickly car thief from Cicero, Illinois, who calls revenge the sweetest thing in life.
Q 15For what crime do German soldiers execute Edgar Derby after the bombing?
Stealing a teapot
Vonnegut called it the climax of the book; the real prisoner, Mike Palaia, was shot over a jar of food.
Q 16What was Edgar Derby's job before the war?
High school teacher
He felt he should fight rather than just send his students off to war; one son was a marine in the Pacific.
Q 17Which failed science fiction writer's work is Billy introduced to in the veterans' hospital?
Kilgore Trout
Eliot Rosewater, who wrote the writer's only fan letter, makes the introduction.
Q 18How many fan letters has the failed science fiction writer ever received?
One
It came from Eliot Rosewater, who has a whole Vonnegut novel of his own.
Q 19What do the Tralfamadorians look like to humans?
Upright toilet plungers with a hand and a single green eye
They reveal that one of their test pilots will accidentally destroy the universe and nothing can be done.
Q 20Who is placed in the zoo alongside Billy as his mate?
Montana Wildhack
She is a film star who had supposedly drowned in San Pedro Bay; they have a child together.
Bertram Rumfoord initially refuses to believe Billy was in Dresden, and looks like Theodore Roosevelt.
Q 24How is Billy killed in 1976?
Shot with a laser gun by an assassin
He has just predicted his own death in a speech at a Chicago baseball stadium; the killer is hired by the elderly Lazzaro.
Q 25By 1976 in the novel, the United States has been partitioned into how many countries?
Twenty
It has also been attacked by China with thermonuclear weapons.
Q 26'If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, ask for' whom, according to a phrase Billy repeats to himself?
Wild Bob
He is a superannuated officer who thinks the prisoners are his 451st Infantry Regiment and dies of pneumonia.
Q 27American-born Nazi Howard W. Campbell Jr. is the protagonist of which other Vonnegut novel?
Mother Night
He appears in a swastika-adorned cowboy hat and boots with a red, white and blue armband.
Q 28Bertram Rumfoord is likely related to Winston Niles Rumfoord, a character from which Vonnegut novel?
The Sirens of Titan
Billy's favourite science-fiction hack, meanwhile, returns as a main character in Breakfast of Champions.
Q 29What sound does the bird make at the end of the novel, after the firebombing?
'Poo-tee-weet?'
The same bird sings outside Billy's hospital window.
Q 30The novel's opening interjection 'Listen:' has been said to mimic the opening of which medieval poem?
Beowulf
That poem opens with 'Hwaet!'