Oh, wait, it's a science-fiction book. Billy Pilgrim, the main character of the novel came unstuck in time. Billy experiences different events of his life out of sequence, he walks through a door in 1955 and comes out in another in 1941, he goes back through that door to find himself in 1963, he goes to sleep a senile widower and awakens on his wedding day. He is in a constant state of stage fright because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next. Surely, that determines the nonlinear narrative. Along with the war parts, there are two other storylines, Billy's life before and after war and his experience of being kidnapped by a flying saucer to be displayed in the zoo on the planet Tralfamadore.
In 1944 Billy Pilgrim is a preposterous twenty-one year old guy "with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches". He is hesitatory, weak-willed chaplain's assistant in the war who was taken prisoner by Germans and survived the bombing of Dresden. Billy was among four dazed wanderers after the German attack. There were also an antitank gunner Roland Weary and two infantry scouts. Weary was eighteen; he had been unpopular because he was stupid and fat and mean. He imagined himself in the future telling a "true war story" about the Three Musketeers (him and the scouts) and the weak college kid whose life they saved. But the Germans shot two scouts dead and captured Billy and Roland. Weary never reached Dresden: he died in the train of gangrene that had started in his mangled feet.
After the war Billy finished the School of Optometry, married its owner's daughter and became a rich man. His wife Valencia who wasn't pretty or slender died accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning while Billy was recuperating in a hospital. He has two children, Robert who fought in Vietnam and Barbara, on whose wedding day Billy was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore. He writes about this in the paper and speaks on the radio in a talk show trying to explain to Earthlings what he learned from aliens about time. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It's just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, they say. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. "So it goes", they say.
In 1944 Billy Pilgrim is a preposterous twenty-one year old guy "with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches". He is hesitatory, weak-willed chaplain's assistant in the war who was taken prisoner by Germans and survived the bombing of Dresden. Billy was among four dazed wanderers after the German attack. There were also an antitank gunner Roland Weary and two infantry scouts. Weary was eighteen; he had been unpopular because he was stupid and fat and mean. He imagined himself in the future telling a "true war story" about the Three Musketeers (him and the scouts) and the weak college kid whose life they saved. But the Germans shot two scouts dead and captured Billy and Roland. Weary never reached Dresden: he died in the train of gangrene that had started in his mangled feet.
After the war Billy finished the School of Optometry, married its owner's daughter and became a rich man. His wife Valencia who wasn't pretty or slender died accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning while Billy was recuperating in a hospital. He has two children, Robert who fought in Vietnam and Barbara, on whose wedding day Billy was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore. He writes about this in the paper and speaks on the radio in a talk show trying to explain to Earthlings what he learned from aliens about time. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It's just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, they say. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. "So it goes", they say.
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