Chapter 2 Summary

The chapter begins with a declaration that is essential to the narrative style and plot structure of the novel: “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” The protagonist travels through time and doesn’t know when he will leave a moment and enter another in a different time and space. Billy feels that he is in a “constant state of stage fright” as he has no clue in which scene he has to “act” next; neither does he have any control over the destination. The author further tries to provide some information about Billy in a chronological fashion.

Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. As a kid, he is described as “funny-looking” and continues to be so when he grows up. After graduating from high school, Billy is trained to be an optometrist for one semester before he is deployed to Europe to serve in World War II. There he assists as a chaplain’s assistant before he is captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a slaughterhouse. After his return from the war, he gets engaged to Valencia Merble, the daughter of a renowned optometrist, and completes his study in Optometry. During this time, he suffers from a nervous breakdown and is treated with shock therapy at a veteran’s hospital. He finally recovers, marries Valencia, begets a daughter—Barbara—and a son—Robert—and becomes a wealthy optometrist in Ilium. Barbara later marries a wealthy optometrist, while Robert, after having gone through a troubled teenage phase, gets his life on track and serves as a Green Beret in the Vietnam War.

Billy survives a plane crash in 1968. His wife, on her way to see him at the hospital, dies of carbon-monoxide poisoning. Billy returns to Ilium and is looked after by Barbara and a housekeeper. After that, Billy goes on a radio show in New York City to talk about his abduction by aliens to the planet Tralfamadore in 1967, and how the aliens had kept him in a zoo and made him mate with another woman from Earth—Montana Wildhack, an adult film star. Barbara gets concerned about Billy’s sanity and is embarrassed by her father. Billy insists that his story is true. Describing the Tralfamadorians, he writes a letter to the local newspaper and promises to reveal what he has learned from the aliens in his next letter. The day the first letter is published, Billy is busy drafting his second letter about the knowledge he has received from the Tralfamadorians. He mentions that the concept of time on Tralfamadore is very different from that on Earth. The Tralfamadorians don’t believe in the linear progression of time. Instead, time for them is captured in moments that are permanent. Hence, the past, present, and the future exist simultaneously. A dead person for the Tralfamadorians is nothing but someone who is in a bad state at that moment. It is this knowledge that has led Billy to brush off death and casually mention “So it goes” in response to death. Montana Wildhack, an adult film star. Barbara gets concerned about Billy’s sanity and is embarrassed by her father. Billy insists that his story is true. Describing the Tralfamadorians, he writes a letter to the local newspaper and promises to reveal what he has learned from the aliens in his next letter. The day the first letter is published, Billy is busy drafting his second letter about the knowledge he has received from the Tralfamadorians. He mentions that the concept of time on Tralfamadore is very different from that on Earth. The Tralfamadorians don’t believe in the linear progression of time. Instead, time for them is captured in moments that are permanent. Hence, the past, present, and the future exist simultaneously. A dead person for the Tralfamadorians is nothing but someone who is in a bad state at that moment. It is this knowledge that has led Billy to brush off death and casually mention “So it goes” in response to death.

The narrator then goes on to describe how Billy’s father dies and how Billy joins the military service. Billy’s father is killed in a hunting accident while Billy is in service in South Carolina. He gets leave from the service for a few days. However, he is soon deployed as an assistant to an infantry chaplain in Luxembourg when the entire regiment is defeated by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. Although Billy survives, along with three other American soldiers, he ends up wandering behind German lines. Out of the other three American soldiers, two are quiet and capable scouts, while the third, Roland Weary, is an arrogant, cruel, and delusional anti-tank gunner, who keeps saving Billy’s life thinking that he will be recognized as a hero one day for his valor. Roland Weary imagines an alliance with the other two scouts and calls the trio “the three musketeers.”

Billy first time travels in a forest in Luxembourg while marching with the other three in the cold. Thoroughly exhausted from the walk, he leans against a tree, lagging behind the others and unwilling to continue further. He travels through the extremes of life: from moments before birth to moments after death and lands on a memory of his childhood. He is a little boy and his father, a believer of the sink-or-swim method, throws him at the deep end of a YMCA pool. He drowns and passes out. He is rescued but he detests that.

With a blink of an eye, Billy next time-travels to 1965 and then to 1958 and finally to 1961. In 1965, Billy is visiting his mother at a nursing home. Within the blink of an eye, he travels to 1958 to the Little League Banquet for Robert, Billy’s son, where the coach is delivering an emotional speech. With another blink, he lands up drunk at a party in 1961, where for the first time, he is cheating on his wife Valencia in the laundry room. He passes out and again wakes up to Ronald Weary shaking him up in the forest of Luxembourg.

Unable and unwilling to continue, Billy asks Weary to leave him. In order to play the hero, Weary starts kicking Billy to make him move. The scouts, meanwhile, realizing the Germans are approaching, abandon the two. Weary is devastated at this and blames Billy for breaking up the “three musketeers.” Billy again time-travels to 1957, where he is delivering an eloquent speech at the Lion’s Club. He wonders how he had become capable of delivering such articulate speeches when he remembers about the public speaking course he has attended. When he again time-travels to the forest, he and Weary are captured by the Germans.

Chapter 2 Analysis

Vonnegut provides a chronology of Billy’s life till 1968, although not taking the readers away from the experience of nonlinear time by Billy. The chronology serves a practical purpose and provides the reader an idea about Billy’s entire life. However, because of the situation under which Billy time-travels, together with the fact that the time-travel doesn’t occur in a linear, progressive manner, readers can immediately perceive Billy’s plight of being rendered a mute spectator of such a bizarre experience, where he possesses no control during the time-travels. Billy cannot even control precisely when a time-shift might occur.

The plotline also moves away from the traditional method of building a narrative. Instead of building suspense and tension in a gradual manner, Vonnegut exposes the entire life of Billy in the first few pages of the novel. He doesn’t develop Billy’s character as a traditional protagonist with opposite forces constantly trying to create a crisis in Billy’s life. Rather, the beauty and intricacy of the narrative lie in the vivid portrayal of the specific moments in Billy’s life, as if readers glimpse snapshots of Billy’s life as he shifts unpredictably from one moment to another. Along with Billy, the readers experience a wide array of emotions into which Billy finds himself while time-traveling.

The nonlinear sequencing of Billy’s experience exemplifies the key mantra in the novel: that the human psyche links moments of a person’s life through emotional associations rather than chronology. The moments through which Billy time-travels are not random but are associated by Billy’s emotional state of being. For example, in the forest of Luxembourg, Billy wants to give up and die. He time-travels to another moment—during a swimming lesson with his father at YMCA—where he is in the same emotional state. Hence, the apparent random moments are, on closer inspection, not so random.

The concept of time observed by the Tralfamadorians indicates that whatever happens is predestined. We are puppets in the hands of fate and cannot evade or change our past, present, and future. Instead, it is wise to just accept moments as they come, be it linear or nonlinear. Billy’s mental state, afflicted with the trauma of the war, resonates with this idea as this provides him with an escape from the question of the purpose of a war. Therefore, the idea that nothing is inescapable and everything’s meant to be provides Billy with an outlet for his trauma.

The novel raises concern regarding human dignity during an era of mass killings and war fueled by the advent of advanced technology. During Billy’s time in the war, he was denied dignity by not being provided with proper accoutrements of a soldier. Additionally, he falls prey to the delusional Roland Weary who, in order to establish himself as a hero, treats Billy inhumanly, thus taking away Billy’s opportunity of living a dignified life.

The phrase “so it goes” is an important motif in Slaughterhouse-Five. The Tralfamadorians use this phrase in acceptance of death and believe that death is just the downside of a person in that moment. The phrase functions at different levels. The author uses the phrase to signify not only the death of a person but also of animals, ideas, and values. On the one hand, the phrase implies the acceptance of death and not to consider it too seriously; on the other hand, it continues to constantly remind us of the inevitability of death.